


departed acts (remorse is memory awake)

by riptheh



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Child Abuse, Dark, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Memory Loss, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Out of Order Narrative, and manipulative/abusive parents, basically adora makes a deal w catra to go back to the horde and shadow weaver wipes her mind, please don't read if you're sensitive about implied or shown child abuse, shadow weaver's abuse towards them is heavily referenced and occasionally shown so ye, takes place after promise in s1, this could also be considered an extended character study on catra, well a hopeful ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:56:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24802705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riptheh/pseuds/riptheh
Summary: Catra knows something Adora doesn't.orInstead of letting go at the end of Promise, Adora makes a deal with Catra to go back to the Horde. What neither of them expect is for Shadow Weaver to wipe Adora's mind, and make everything just the way it was.Except it's really, really not.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 256





	departed acts (remorse is memory awake)

**Author's Note:**

> okay so yes I have a longfic running with adora being basically mindwiped and yes this is yet another fic with her mindwiped. we exist, thank you
> 
> a note: this fic deals very heavily with shadow weaver's abuse, including depicting it, so please be kind to yourself if you are sensitive about that kind of thing.
> 
> another note: the narrative is heavily out of order because I'm pretentious and it's fanfic, so ye. that might be confusing, but there should be time stamps for each section
> 
> anyway, enjoy!

_**Present:** _

“You were late for training again.”

Catra looks up as Adora saunters into the room and flops onto her bunk, hard enough to send the pillow flying. She grabs it before it falls over the edge and shoots Catra a grin that says _you’re gonna be in trouble_. Catra, for her part, scoffs and rolls her eyes.

“Force Captains don’t need to go to training.”

“ _Probationary_ Force Captain,” Adora reminds her, but her eyes go to the badge on Catra’s chest anyway and linger, wistful. 

“Yeah, well.” Catra drops her gaze and shifts slightly, moving the badge out of view. She has half the urge to cover it with her palm, but stifles the feeling. “Probationary is only a matter of time.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Adora is still watching her, she can feel it, her gaze longing, and it’s uncomfortable. Adora’s never been good at hiding her feelings anyway, and Catra’s never been in a position like this before, where she has something Adora wants. Once, she would have killed for such a thing. Now, it’s only weird.

She doesn’t look at her until she hears Adora sigh, feels the bed shift as she looks away. Only then does Catra look up, watches her trace a patternless shape onto the blanket pulled tight across the bed. She’s a little sweaty, like she’s just gotten done sparring and didn’t bother to take a shower, and her ponytail is messy, a few strands falling over her forehead.

There’s a scar at her temple, round and reddish, like a burn, and Catra stares at it. It’s months old, she knows, but that doesn’t make the appearance hurt any less. Not that it should hurt at all.

It is, as Shadow Weaver has reminded her many times, exactly what she wanted.

“So.” Adora looks up, her hand stilling, and blinks when she finds Catra already staring at her. Quickly, Catra looks away. “Uh, did you want to get dinner?”

“Dinner?” Catra repeats stupidly, her thoughts miles away. That’s where they always are these days, and it’s probably why, when she says probationary is a matter of time, she means she’s probably gonna lose it if she doesn’t shape up. That’s what Shadow Weaver says, anyway, and Shadow Weaver, in her new, perfect little dominion, is always right.

“Yeah.” Adora smiles crookedly, and she hates that smile, she loves that smile— “To make up for all that training. You know, that you didn’t do.”

“Shut up!” Catra shoves her stupid face away, forcing a laugh she almost means, and sits up as Adora falls onto her pillow with a snort. “Okay, I’m going. But just so I can trick Kyle into trading his ration bars for something stupid.”

“You’re so _mean_ ,” Adora says, but because she’s laughing, she doesn’t see the way Catra flinches. Doesn’t know that it hits far too close to home, and even though that hurts, enough to pull a nasty retort to her tongue, she swallows it. It wouldn’t be fair, anyway.

Not when she knows what Adora doesn’t.

So instead she grins, cocky and flippant, and hooks her thumbs in her belt. “And yet you still hang out with me. Now, are you coming or what?”

Still laughing, Adora shakes her head, then sticks out a hand. Catra takes it, pulling her to her feet, and doesn’t pull away when Adora tightens her grip, swinging their hands like they’re friends.

They used to hold hands a lot, Catra recalls with a surge of bitter nostalgia. Like it meant something, like it didn’t even matter. Like they had no history between them, because all that history was happening right then, sweet and shy and utterly naive. Like they were friends, and that was all, and Catra never had to tear apart the world to bring Adora back.

It’s not over, exactly, but it’s not the same. Maybe it never will be. 

But sometimes, Catra has learned in her short, and somehow impossibly long life, you have to take what you can get.

So she lets Adora hold her hand and doesn’t pull away, and when the guilt rises in her chest, she squashes it like a bug beneath her foot. 

She’s a Force Captain, after all. Force Captains don’t need to feel guilty.

**_Five months earlier:_ **

“Goodbye, Adora.” Catra tosses the sword over the ledge and turns, tail flicking like she knows she’s won. Because she has. “I really am going to miss you.”

The sword sails past Adora’s head, and never makes a sound. Her nails are slipping, digging into rock she can’t be sure is there at all. Her feet swing, searching for a hold, and there is none.

She’s going to die. She knows this, feels it right at the center of her bones. She’s going to die, and Glimmer is going to die, and Catra is going to hate her forever, and it’s all her fault.

Just like it always has been.

“Catra!” she screams, but it’s too late, she’s already gone. “Catra, _no!”_

The world is caving in around her, the space dissolving, even the air whisking away. Going to die, going to die beats like a drumbeat in her chest. She’s choking on the sensation of failure, drowning in it.

She has to make things right. That’s what She-Ra does, that’s what she’s meant to do, but she’s just Adora now, and Adora doesn’t—she doesn’t—

She has years to make up for, and it might be too late to start now.

“Catra, wait!” Desperation fills her lungs, and claws out of her like a gasp of air. “CATRA! PLEASE!”

Nobody answers, and in a panic she starts to shout wildly, legs swinging, fingers inching off the rock. She’s going to fall, she can feel it, and she can barely breathe for fear. “Catra, come back! I’m sorry! I’ll help you! I’ll come back, I’ll—I’ll make it up—”

For a long moment, there’s nothing. Just the clangs and groans of the half-dead and fully beaten spiders, the slow dissolve of the world around her, and her own shaky breathing.

“Catra!” she calls, just as her fingers truly start to slide. “Catra, please—!”

“Geez, are you gonna shout forever?”

She sees her ears first, and that stupid, bushy mane of hair she has, and almost cries in relief. Except she doesn’t. Instead, she swallows the tears, choking on them, and laughs instead.

“You came back,” she gasps. She can barely see her through her blurred vision. “You came back for me.”

“I came back because you turned into a huge coward, apparently,” Catra sneers, her face peeking over the ledge. She still hasn’t bothered to extend a hand. “Still trying to decide if I should just wait for you to drop.”

“Catra, I—” Adora starts, then stops. Her fingers are numb from holding on. A few seconds more, she knows, and she’ll slip no matter what Catra decides. “I’ll come back with you. We can make a deal. Just—I don’t want to die here.”

Not here, not when her friends still need her. Not with the knowledge that her once best friend hates her. Not in the very place she was supposed to protect, attacked by creatures that are supposed to be on her own side.

Catra raises an eyebrow, and doesn’t move. Her tail is swishing back and forth with slow, languid ease. She looks entirely unperturbed. 

“How can I trust you?” she asks after a long moment. Adora gapes. 

“I—I don’t have the sword anymore,” she answers, and that’s answer enough, isn’t it? Without the sword, she’s useless. She can’t be She-Ra anymore, so she’s just Adora. Stupid, worthless Adora, who can’t fight and can’t even protect her friends properly. Now, a deal might be all she has.

And then, just as she’s contemplating this, or more accurately, drowning in it, a pebble shifts beneath her fingers, and it’s enough to loosen her grip. She scrabbles for a grip, but it’s too late. Her fingers slip free, and with a swallowed scream, she falls.

A hand snags her, claws digging into her palm, and she doesn’t even have time to heave a sigh of relief before Catra pulls her bodily over the edge with grunt of effort.

“Geez, you’re heavy,” she says, and lets go the second Adora is halfway over the ledge, feet still swinging freely. She has to pull herself the rest of the way, scrambling for purchase, then leans forward with her legs tucked beneath her and her elbows against the ground, and tries desperately to get her breathing under control.

She can feel Catra’s eyes upon her the whole time, and after nearly a minute, it’s she who breaks the silence. “Was that a real attempt at a deal, or am I going to have to throw you back over the ledge?”

Adora sucks in one last breath and sits back on her heels, raising her gaze to meet Catra’s head on. “It was real. I’m not a liar, Catra.”

Catra snorts. “Yeah, because you’re too stupid to lie.”

“And you’re too good at it,” Adora shoots back, but Catra only raises an eyebrow.

“I would take that as a compliment,” she says dryly. Adora glares.

“I need you to help my friend,” she says after a long moment, and watches Catra’s face shift immediately to disgust. With a scoff, she starts to clamber to her feet. 

“Wait—!” Adora lunges forward and snags her by the hem of her shirt, forcing her to stop. When Catra looks down, she sets her jaw and meets her gaze steadily. 

“I meant what I said,” she continues, before Catra can pull away. “I’ll come back with you to the Horde. We can work out something there. But you have to help my friend.”

“I can’t help your friend,” Catra answers. Still, she doesn’t move away. “I don’t know what Shadow Weaver did to her.”

“Then let me talk to her,” Adora begs, dimly aware of how desperate she sounds, but too far gone to cover it up. “Please, Catra—I can’t just—”

“Let her down?” Catra’s face twists into a sneer. “You let me down often enough. Why does she get special treatment?”

Adora stares, mouth open. She doesn’t have an answer. She’s never been good at this, the feelings thing, or rather, the figuring-the-feelings-out thing. It’s always been a gap between the two of them, Catra one step ahead, Adora stumbling along behind. There were times, back when they were both cadets, that Catra would give her these looks sometimes, looks that she thought she was supposed to know what to do with, but she never quite got there. Eventually, she stopped trying to figure it out, or Catra gave up, or something in between. She can’t remember what.

“She doesn’t get special treatment,” she manages at last. Her fingers are still curled in the fabric of Catra’s shirt. “It’s not like that, Catra, I just—I can’t let somebody die because of me. Please.”

She’s not sure it’ll work. In fact, she’s almost certain it won’t. Catra’s still looking at her like she doesn’t quite know what to do with her, and Adora’s fingers are going stiff, curled into her shirt, and she can hear the slow movements of the spiders coming back to life around them. They have to get out, and soon, if they want to live.

Then Catra lets out a huff and pushes Adora’s hand from her shirt. 

“C’mon, prisoner,” she says. “I found the way out. Follow me, and don’t try anything, or I will kill you.”

Adora nods gratefully as she clambers to her feet, and doesn’t let the threat bother her.

She knows that she won’t.

—————

Things change, and stay the same, and Catra would have been a fool to expect anything else.

“This puts her back considerably for Force Captain,” Shadow Weaver says, like it’s Catra’s fault, and Catra bristles.

“I thought I was Force Captain,” she says, and Shadow Weaver throws back her head and laughs.

“Oh, don’t worry, Catra dear,” she says, and extends one finger as if to brush her cheek—the same ugly gesture she’d used so often on Adora. Catra jerks away in disgust, and the finger drops. “You’ll be put on probationary status, promotion pending good behavior, as most new Force Captains are. Of course, assuming bad behavior—”

She breaks off and shakes her head regretfully. Catra glares.

“This isn’t fair,” she hisses, but Shadow Weaver simply waves her hand and turns away. “I brought Adora back! I—”

“You are still Force Captain, Catra.” This time, Shadow Weaver’s voice holds a warning note. “I have allowed you to keep your promotion. Don’t make me—or Hordak—regret it.”

Then, before Catra can respond, she slips away, shadows swirling and then fading as if she was never there at all.

It’s uncanny, and unnerving, and Catra hates it. She stares at the spot she was for a long time, seething, then spins on her heel and stalks off in the opposite direction.

**_Present:_ **

“Point, Adora!”

Adora stops, then straightens, panting hard, sparring staff held loosely in both hands. Her opponent, a boy Catra doesn’t recognize, who must be from a different squad, groans and pushes himself into a sitting position. 

At the pause, the instructor frowns and crosses his arms. “I said point, not that the match was done. Jeffrey, get up. One more loss, and you’ll be booted to the labor camps.”

“You said that last time,” Jeffrey mutters, but he pushes himself to his feet anyway, and takes up an unsteady stance against Adora. “Ok, I’m re—hey!”

With a yell, Adora rushes him, staff swinging. Jeffrey only barely manages to avoid the end of it, but recovers quickly and hits back with a strong jab of his own.

Catra watches them go back and forth, swinging and skipping around the sparring court, the dance punctuated only by the occasional sound of wood against armor, and even more rarely, the _thwack!_ of the staff against flesh. Adora gives as good as she gets, and mostly better, but Catra can’t help but wince every time a hit lands.

The match ends when Jeffrey lands a lucky hit to Adora’s head, hard enough that she crumples like a load of bricks. At the sight, Catra jerks upright, heart pounding in her chest, and for several awful seconds, can’t move. 

Then, with a groan, Adora pushes herself into a sitting position and raises her visor.

“Nice hit,” she tells Jeffrey, who gives a weak grin and extends a hand.

“Sorry I got your head,” he says as she pulls herself painfully to her feet. “I was aiming for your shoulder, I promise.”

“Yeah, well,” Adora grunts as she straightens, swaying slightly. “We all miss sometimes. Maybe, uh, miss the other way next time, though.”

Jeffrey grins then, and even though it’s good-natured, it’s also painted with relief. “Yeah, but then I’d be in the labor camps.”

Adora laughs at this, her voice echoing across the room, and Catra leans back, forcing her heart rate to calm. It doesn’t really work.

This is normal, she reminds herself. How many hits do they take a week in sparring? How many hits has she, herself, taken? Adora is a good fighter, but she’s slow, and one glance could tell Catra she’s probably been out here for hours. She took a hit. It happens. 

There’s also blood running down her forehead, but Adora is grinning through it, and she looks so stupid that Catra can’t even make herself look away.

“You got something on your face,” she calls out as Adora approaches, who actually looks puzzled for a whole second before reaching up to touch her forehead. 

“Oh,” she says, and maybe it’s not just Adora’s natural stupid gene that’s giving the slow reaction, Catra realizes a moment later, because her eyes, when they go back to Catra, are glassy and unfocused, and her fingers are trembling slightly.

“You dummy.” There’s a tremor in Catra’s voice too, which is stupid, so stupid, because just a few months ago she really tried to kill her. Would have done it too, if not for Adora’s last, desperate outstretched hand. “How many rounds did you go? Ten? Eleven?”

Adora winces as she takes off her helmet to reveal matted hair, and a large bump, cracked open red like some ugly, bloody egg. “Uh, thirteen?”

“You _idiot_.” Catra turns to the nearby sink and snatches a towel, then turns back and hands it to Adora, who takes it and presses it to her head. “Why the hell did you do that? Are you trying to get yourself killed _before_ you fight the princesses?”

Adora shrugs, then winces again as she presses the towel to the lump on her head. She’s got a patchwork of other injuries too, including a split lip and a nicely purpled bruise spreading across her elbow. “I’m just trying to get back in the game, Catra. Especially after I, uh, you know. Screwed up big time.”

Catra freezes, and can only watch in what feels like slow motion as Adora adjusts the towel to her head, then reaches up to push back locks of tangled hair. “Thaymor wasn’t a screw-up, Adora. It happens to anybody.”

“Yeah, but it happened to _me_.” Adora lowers the towel, inspects her forehead with a touch of her fingers, and satisfied, dumps the stained towel in a nearby bin. “I lost us the entire battle, Catra. I lost my one and only shot at making permanent Force Captain. And I can’t even remember _doing_ it.”

Catra’s throat is dry as sandpaper, and when she swallows, no saliva moves down her throat. She feels like she’s shaking, but her hands are still at her sides.

Just a good liar, she supposes.

“That doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself training,” she says, forcing a hard edge into her voice. “And I’m telling you that as a Force Captain, Adora. _Your_ Force Captain, actually, which means you have to listen to me.”

Adora frowns, wrinkling her nose in such a petulant way that Catra is forcibly reminded of six year old Adora, being told she wasn’t old enough to handle weapons. “Catra, you can’t just ask me not to train.”

“I’m not asking you not to train,” Catra says. Has it always been so hard to get Adora to do something? she wonders. She’s never had trouble with it before—except, of course, when Adora left and never came back until she did. Except for all those times she refused Catra’s pleas, and only came back when her life—and her friend’s life—was on the line. 

But before that, she dimly recalls, she had Adora around her little finger, and didn’t even mean it. When they were younger, Adora would sneak Catra ration bars when she was denied food, invite her into her bed even when she wasn’t allowed, and show her the answers to the tests despite the severe consequences such an action might invoke. Catra had never asked her to do any of those things, but Adora did them all as if they were free, and not as if every action had a heavy price tag.

And in return, though she doesn’t know it, Catra protected her when she probably shouldn’t have. Let her win fights instead of taking advantage of her comparative slowness, and gave up her own training slots for latrine duty because she knew Adora wanted them. Haggled with the others to get Adora the gray rations because she knew they were her favorite, and even gave up her own on occasion, just because she liked to see Adora’s smile. 

They always watched out for each other, until they didn’t, and it’s bizarre to Catra that she’s doing the same thing now, when everything is entirely different. She’s not even sure it’s better. Not when Adora is training sixteen hours a day, and looking at her badge like it’s the only damn thing in the world she wants.

It’s an odd dynamic between them, and maybe she thought things would go back to normal once Adora came back, but really, this is all new.

“I’m not asking you not to train,” she says again, because Adora’s got her mouth open as if she’s going to argue, “but you need rest sometime. And I’m not saying that as a friend.”

Adora hesitates as if she wants to argue, and for a split second, Catra thinks that she will. She opens her mouth, then shuts it again.

Then, she sighs, and gives in, a surrendering smile spreading across her face. 

“Let me guess,” she says, one hand still raised as if to touch the lump on her head, which now truly is the size of an egg. “If you’re not saying it as a friend, you’re saying it as a—”

“Force Captain,” Catra says firmly, and that ends the argument.

She hopes.

**_Five months earlier:_ **

The way back to the Fright Zone is long, but not treacherous. It simply takes them forever, and Catra makes sure to stride ahead, forcing Adora to stumble along behind, tripping over branches and crashing through brushes.

“Did you choose the most overgrown path on purpose?” she calls once to Catra, who doesn’t turn around, nor slow down. She just keeps on going, hands curled into fists at her sides, tensed as if waiting for Adora to attempt something.

She doesn’t think she will. Once they’d made it out of the First Ones’ fortress, Catra had torn a strip of cloth from Adora’s jacket, ignoring her protests, and tied her hands together just in case. Adora, surprisingly, had not protested, which only lent more proof that she might actually be telling the truth about her deal.

Which just goes to figure, Catra thinks bitterly. She’ll go to the ends of Etheria for her stupid, sparkly friend, but won’t even come back to the Fright Zone when _Catra_ asks her to.

Oh no. It has to be on her terms.

“There’s no paths in the Whispering Woods,” she replies tersely, and continues walking. There’s a huff, then the sound of pounding footsteps as Adora jogs to catch up to her.

“You could look at me, you know,” she says as she falls into pace beside her. “I’m not your enemy, Catra.”

“Oh, really?” Catra gives her a derisive glance, her eyes roaming first over the shiny golden wing attached to her belt, then to the bindings on her hands. “Then why have you been fighting me?”

“I—” Adora opens her mouth, then shuts it again. “I never wanted to fight you, Catra! Why won’t you just believe me?”

Catra snorts and turns her gaze to the path ahead. “I don’t know. Maybe because you literally left. And left me to pick up the pieces. You don’t get a say in this, Adora. You’re under my control now.”

“Is that what you want?” Adora asks, her voice low with an anger that surprises Catra. Adora doesn’t really get angry, and when she does, it’s less like thunder and more like lightning—hot, fast, and gone too quick to matter. 

Except where it strikes.

“I want Shadow Weaver out of my hair,” Catra mutters, her eyes fixed on the non-path ahead. “And I want my position as Force Captain secure. If that means bringing you to her, then that’s what I’ll do.”

And maybe things will be the same, a small voice pines in the back of her head. Maybe Adora will change her mind, and remember how it was, and stay. Maybe—

But that’s not what will happen, and Catra knows it. Because it’s not like Adora cares about any parts that actually mattered.

And it’s not like Catra would remind her. 

“So that’s it?” Adora’s voice is hard as she stumbles along, tripping over foliage and heels sinking in the soft dirt. “You just want to climb the ranks? Nothing else? What about—”

“You don’t GET to talk to me about this!” With no warning, Catra spins around, stopping so squarely in front of her that Adora nearly hits her head on. “Take a look at yourself, Adora! That’s all you’ve wanted since the dawn of time! That’s what we were going to do together! Now, you left—” One finger, claw out, jabs her in the chest— “and I have to do it myself. Well, that’s your loss.”

With that she turns and starts ahead again, leaving Adora to follow. For several seconds, She doesn’t hear Adora’s footsteps, but can feel her eyes hitting the small of her back, burning with something she can’t identify. Loss maybe, and that hurts more than anger.

“Keep up!” she calls back, and there’s a pause, then Adora’s stumbling footsteps fill the whispering silence.

For a long while, they keep going like that, through the dense foliage, Adora trailing behind, Catra head, occasionally using her claws to slice through bushes and vines. Neither of them talk, until they at last stumble out of the trees and into the bare space that opens up right before the Fright Zone.

Catra stops, though she doesn’t know why, and Adora takes that moment to sidle up beside her.

“It doesn’t look any different,” she breathes, and Catra nearly laughs.

“You were here two days ago, you idiot,” she replies. “Can’t believe you were stupid enough to come back.”

She hears Adora take in a deep, steadying sigh before entering. “I have to. Besides, we made a deal.”

“Oh, yeah?” Catra rounds on her then, eyes roaming suspiciously over her person, over the eyes that, despite how ice cold they can be, are entirely guileless. Adora’s always been like that, though—doesn’t have a lying bone in her body. “And what are you going to do about this deal, Adora? How do I know you won’t try to escape once you get what you want? That is, if you think Shadow Weaver will even let you go.”

Adora opens her mouth, and shuts it again. It’s clear, Catra realizes suddenly from the gears turning in her head, that she hasn’t entirely thought this through. Then, that’s particularly in-character for her. 

“I’ll talk to Shadow Weaver,” she says firmly, like she actually believes some good will come out of it. “And I won’t run off, Catra. I’ll—” she swallows hard— “I’ll do what you want, as long as you keep your end of the bargain.”

And she means that, Catra realizes suddenly, because she doesn’t have a choice. Now, looking at her, her face scuffed and scratched from their travels, her outfit dirty, she sees what Adora is thinking, clear as glass. She’s nothing now, without her sword. She isn’t She-Ra, and she isn’t powerful enough to fight back by herself. She’s desperate, and tossing her last chance to Catra.

All it took to get her back, Catra realizes, and she’s not sure if her stomach is sinking or fluttering with victory, was to take away the one thing that made her special.

Because that’s what Adora has to be. Special.

It’s almost satisfying, to see what she is without.

“Fine,” Catra replies, harsh just to make it count. “I promise. I’ll help your stupid friend— _if_ we do this together. And _if_ you better make good on your end. You have to promise.”

Relief splits across Adora’s face like the sun shining through clouds. All of a sudden, Catra is looking at her and seeing not Adora, but the gap-toothed girl who once told her they only had each other, and nothing could stop them.

“Promise,” she says, and Catra really thinks that she means it.

**_Present:_ **

Adora looks stupid with a big lump on her head.

That’s what Catra can’t help but think, every time she sees her, though that’s not strictly true. Rather, it’s what she forces herself to think every time Adora tosses her a smile or leans back in her chair during a briefing and rolls her eyes like it’s so boring. Adora isn’t usually the type to make such gestures, or at least, not since Thaymor happened. Usually, she sits ramrod straight in her chair and watches the instructor—today, the Force Captain of a neighboring squad—as they go on about various battle tactics and strategies against the princesses. 

But today, the briefing has gone on for two hours, so it’s almost not even a surprise when Adora leans back in her chair, head lolling, and gives Catra the most dramatic eye roll she’s ever seen. 

Catra, despite herself, giggles. 

“Catra!” The Force Captain, who she would be on equal footing with if she weren’t _probationary_ , snaps her name, and Catra immediately straightens, hissing internally. She rarely hisses out loud anymore—the urge has long since been beaten out of her—but she’s trying to look like a Force Captain, damn it, and as usual, Adora is the one getting her in trouble. 

Adora, at least, has the manners to look guilty. She straightens as well, flushing slowly, and turns back to the front. Her fingers grip the edge of the metal desk, nails digging in, and Catra watches with an idle sort of interest she can’t really place. She used to watch Adora all the time with a strange sort of captivity, used to wait for that one stubborn strand of hair to fall in her face, and wonder what it would be like to push it away, or sometimes, when she got bored and impatient, she would inch her desk closer and nudge Adora with her foot until she turned red from trying not to laugh.

Now, she watches Adora with a sick feeling in her stomach, the kind she used to get when she messed up and she knew Shadow Weaver was going to catch her.

Like she’s done something wrong.

But it’s not her fault, she reminds herself, even as her stomach twists and guilt starts to work its way through her chest, curling around her heart like vines. Shadow Weaver did this to Adora, not Catra. Adora made a deal, and Catra kept up her end of the bargain. Glimmer, she knows, is curse-free, though Shadow Weaver didn’t care to explain how she managed to do such a thing. Glimmer is curse free, and the Rebellion have no idea where Adora is.

And Adora is exactly where she was supposed to be all along.

So why can’t Catra shake the feeling that the hammer is about to fall?

The Force Captain is droning on, his voice as monotone and flat as it was two hours ago, and Catra, already resigned to no end in sight, continues to stare at Adora, trying to parse her feelings. It’s not hatred, when she looks at Adora, even though she almost wishes it was. It’s not quite pity either, because there’s still that anger there, sharp as a knife’s edge and burning dully in her gut. 

She left. Adora can say all the pretty things she wants, dress it up in morals and platitudes and apologies, but she still left. Catra doesn’t know if she’ll ever forgive her for that.

But she doesn’t hate her, and nor does she look at her in the same way. She can’t, not when things have been carefully rearranged so as to pre-suppose the way they used to be, though everybody but Adora knows it’s all wrong. Lonnie and Kyle and Rogelio are sworn to secrecy, and have acquiesced nicely, though Catra sometimes sees them shooting Adora pitiful glances, or angry glances, or somewhere in-between. The instructors slotted her back in as if she had never left, though sometimes Catra sees them pushing her a little too hard, giving out a punishment here or there that she didn’t warrant, writing her up for a mistake that she didn’t make.

It’s all the same, almost exactly, and that’s why it’s precisely not.

And maybe that’s why Catra can’t quite look at Adora the same way. Except she’s still looking at her, staring at her, actually, and she can never quite manage to look away. Not even now, in the middle of a monumentally boring briefing she should be paying attention to, and that’s how she notices the waver.

At first, she almost misses it, because Adora is remarkably good at hiding pain. She doesn’t wince, nor flinch; her expression doesn’t change. There’s only a slight crease of her brow, just for a moment, and then one hard blink, like she’s focusing on a very bright light.

Her hand comes up to touch her temple, the star-shaped scar she thinks she received at the battle of Thaymor, then lowers again.

And Catra knows that something is not okay.

“Adora.” She inches her desk closer while knowing she shouldn’t— _she doesn’t need to help her, has never needed to help her_ —and leans in, one eye on the instructor. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing’s wrong,” Adora hisses back without looking at her, but she’s lying. Her foot is tapping now, the tell-tale sign that she’s hurting, because Adora always taps her foot like that when she’s caught in pain. Like if she could just get up and outrun it, she’d be fine. Catra has teased her about it more than once.

“Liar,” Catra answers with a sidelong glance to the instructor. He’s still, incredibly, droning on. “Tell me what’s wrong. I’m ordering you to.”

“I hate it when you do that,” Adora whispers back with a grimace, but she sucks in a breath and acquiesces all the same.

“My head,” she admits in a voice so low Catra has to strain to hear. “It hurts.”

“From the hit you took?” Catra asks, and Adora shakes her head.

“No, just—” she breaks off with a frown, her eyes still straight ahead. “I don’t know. I feel…foggy.”

Oh. That’s not good. Foggy means concussion, and Catra isn’t going to let Adora get away with a concussion. Not like this, when she’s been beating herself so hard into the ground she might as well be six feet under.

She’s her Force Captain, damn it, which means she’s going to do something about it.

“Force Captain Rolev!” Catra raises a hand and the Force Captain cuts off in his speech, one eyebrow raised.

“What is it?” he sneers, and she briefly imagines clawing him. It would be incredibly satisfying.

“My squad has personal weaponry training in five minutes,” she lies. “We need to leave.”

The Force Captain narrows his eyes at her, but she holds his gaze until at last he drops it with a sigh.

“Fine,” he huffs, and waves a hand towards the door. “But report back to me to get caught up on what you missed.”

“Sure thing,” Catra says through gritted teeth, knowing she has absolutely no intention of doing that. Instead, she stands and ushers her cadets out the door, ignoring their relieved mutterings and appraising glances of her, like she’s just gone one up in their estimation. Adora is the last one out, and even though Catra doesn’t need to, and in fact it probably looks odd, she ushers her out with one hand on her back, as if she might fall at any moment.

“I’m fine, Catra,” Adora says as they make it into the hallway, but one glance can tell that she’s not. Her face is white and strained, and her eyes have gone slightly fuzzy—when she looks at Catra, she gets the impression that she’s looking past her. “You didn’t need to cancel that for me. That was important training.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Catra dismisses with a wave of her hand. Then she leans forward, placing both hands on Adora’s shoulders, and looks her straight in the eye. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”

Adora goes to shake her head. “I’m fi—”

“No, you aren’t. But if you tell me that one more time, you can tell me that in the sparring room. Claws out.”

Adora grins at that, but it’s wavy. “As long as I get a sparring stick.”

“You can sharpen your nails.” Catra is still eying her, trying not to look too concerned, but she can’t help it anyway. It’s clawing up her gut, mixing with guilt and and uncertainty and the terrible fear that _it’s gone wrong, it’s all gone wrong, something’s happened and—_

“Unfair advantage.” Adora is still grinning, but now she’s swaying slightly, and the color on her face is draining like a slow-moving sink. “For m—”

And then she breaks off, her hand going to her mouth and her face twisting up, and before Catra can react she ducks out from beneath her grip and into the nearby bathroom, stumbling like she’s just had about five drinks.

“Adora!” Fear catches in Catra’s throat and she follows without even thinking if it’s a good idea. “Adora, what—”

“M’fine!” a muffled voice calls from a stall, but a moment later Catra catches the tell-tale sound of retching, and when she comes around the door she finds Adora puking up her lunch into a dirty toilet.

“Ew.” Catra wrinkles her nose and plays at being calm, even though her heart is pounding and her throat has gone all dry and scratchy. “Did you eat a bad ration bar?”

Adora shakes her head but doesn’t raise it. Her words come muffled from her crouched position. “It’s—my head,” she gasps, and Catra’s heart sinks. 

“What do you mean, your head?” she steps closer and prays she’s looking calmer than she feels, because inside she feels about as sick as Adora. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Adora gasps, and swallows hard, her knuckles digging white into the fabric of her trousers. “I just—everything’s foggy, and I can’t—I can’t—”

She breaks off and shakes her head, fingers coming up to her temple. 

“Balance must be restored,” she murmurs, and Catra’s heart goes utterly still. “I keep—I keep thinking that. But I don’t know what it means.”

“Sounds like it doesn’t mean anything.” Catra tries to keep her voice lighthearted, but she’s pretty sure there’s a tremor buried under layers of practiced nonchalance. “Sounds like you ate a bad ration bar and you’re hacking up the results.”

“Maybe.” Adora grimaces, her hand still clamped to her temple, then huffs out a breath and leans back against the stall wall, chest moving slowly up and down. Her eyes are shut and her face is drawn and she looks utterly sick, but Catra knows that’s not all it is.

Destiny just has to follow, she thinks bitterly, then wonders when she started thinking of it as a destiny instead of a choice.

“Balance must be restored,” Adora mutters, her eyes still shut against the nausea. “Catra, do you think that means something? Anything?”

Catra shakes her head, her heart pounding. “Sounds like nonsense to me,” she says, and prays that Adora won’t question it. Adora never questions anything in her life—she’s always been so good at following orders.

So why can’t this damn thing just let her go?

“Maybe,” Adora says, but she doesn’t look at all convinced. She opens her eyes and stares moodily at the wall Catra’s leaning against, her brow creased like she’s trying to figure out a difficult equation. 

Then she sighs, and flops her head back against the grimy stall wall.

“I feel like hell,” she says, and Catra manages a laugh.

“You look it,” she says, and Adora just shoots her a weak grin.

“Thanks,” she says, then drops her gaze again to the floor. Her grin drops too, that same frown curving her lips downward.

“Do you ever get—” she starts after a long moment, then stops. She’s still frowning hard, not looking at anything in particular, and Catra is watching her because she can’t look away. “Do you ever feel like you’re supposed to be doing something?”

“You mean like the training we’re missing right now?” Catra drawls, false ease in her voice. Adora looks up at her and smiles, but shakes her head.

“No, like—” the smile fades again, and her brow creases as her gaze distances. “Like something big. I keep feeling like I’m missing something. Ever since Thaymor, you know? Like I just—I just—”

“Just what?” Catra asks, even though she doesn’t want to know the answer, because it’s not _fair_. Adora can’t be here, finally, and not be complete. She can’t have her whole damn mind wiped and still be missing friends that don’t even matter to her, when she left Catra without a look back. 

Things are supposed to be different this time, because they’re exactly the same. It’s not fair that even a trace of difference remains.

“I don’t know,” Adora says with a frown. She looks cute like that, Catra thinks idly, then shakes her head to push the thought away. She’s not too dumb to notice that Adora is pretty, of course, but thinking silly, useless thoughts like that is dangerous. 

Impure, Shadow Weaver would probably call it, and Catra’s had enough of that. 

“I still think you just ate a bad ration bar,” Catra says, and this time Adora breaks away from her thoughtful gaze and really looks at her, a real smile coming to her face. Some of her color is coming back too, and she doesn’t look like she’s about to puke her guts out anymore.

Progress. Catra can’t help but be relieved.

“Yeah,” she says, “maybe I—” 

Then she stops and looks up, and Catra, confused, follows her gaze.

And her heart stops.

Shadows are creeping across the ceiling, curling around the top of the stall like long, ugly roots, sliding down the length with unnatural speed. Catra yelps and jerks away from the stall wall just as they reach her, but Adora, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, is not so lucky. She struggles to her feet, but doesn’t have time to pull away before the shadows curl around her legs and arms, ensnaring her like a bug in a spider’s web.

“Wha—Catra, help!” she calls, and Catra starts forward to help, only to freeze at a familiar hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t think so, Catra,” Shadow Weaver says, just by her ear, and Catra’s blood runs cold. Part of her screams to fight back, to turn around and slash her mask to pieces, but the larger part of her remains frozen, stilled by familiar fear and that awful sense of the hammer about to fall.

She’s done something. She doesn’t know what she’s done, but she’s messed it up somehow, and now—

“Shadow Weaver!” Adora, stupidly, straightens, even in the grip of the shadows, which are winding tighter and tighter about her limbs. “We were just—”

“No need for excuses, Adora,” Shadow Weaver coos, gliding forward. “I am aware of your…illness.”

Adora’s face falls, and Catra feels sick, because she knows what Adora is scared of, and it isn’t that. She’s scared of the humiliation of illness, the terrible treatments and medicines she’ll be run through, the shame of being weak.

But it’s not that, Catra wants to tell her, but her lips won’t even move. It’s not that at all.

“I’m sorry, Shadow Weaver,” Adora says, still struggling to maintain attention though she might as well be caught painfully in a cocoon of shadows. “I just—”

“Need fixing.” Shadow Weaver stops and leans forward, one finger coming out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. It’s the same lock of hair, Catra realizes sickly, that always falls out of her ponytail. “You don’t need to worry, Adora. It’s not your fault. Clearly, the process has errors.”

“…process?” Adora’s face creases in confusion. “What do you…”

“Hush, dear.” Shadow Weaver reaches out with such tenderness that Catra wants to scream, and presses one sharp finger to her the star-shaped scar at her temple. “You needn’t worry about this any longer.”

Shadow Weaver’s never been good at subtlety, Catra thinks dimly, distantly. Adora stares at her for a brief moment longer, and then, suddenly, something clicks.

“Wait,” she says, her voice rising in desperation, and Catra, without thinking, takes a step forward. “I don’t—you don’t need to—”

“Adora—” Catra takes another step forward, knowing she shouldn’t, knowing she can’t even do anything, and Adora’s eyes flick to her.

“Catra, what is she doing?” she asks, her voice just on the verge of panicky. “Catra—”

“Catra will not interfere with the process,” Shadow Weaver says, voice slick and too-sweet. “Now, Adora, please. You want to be a good soldier, do you not?”

“I—yes, but—” Adora’s eyes move back to Shadow Weaver, and she opens her mouth to say something more, but doesn’t make it. In that moment, Shadow Weaver presses her finger hard against her temple, hard enough to bruise, and Adora jerks like she’s been electrocuted. Her eyes roll back in her head, her mouth gapes open, her body shakes silently, and Catra can only watch, nauseated. 

It’s her fault, she thinks. She’s done this, even though she hasn’t, she’s done nothing but not raise a finger. Still, the thought persists.

She’s done this.

It seems to last forever, but Catra knows it can’t be more than a minute before Shadow Weaver abruptly pulls back, her shadows retreating as if from a sharp ray of sun. Adora, with nothing to hold her, crumples right to the floor, but Catra catches her at the last moment, cradling her body in a way she’s never really done before.

For a moment, she just looks at Adora, who appears, for all intents and purposes, fast asleep. Her chest is rising and falling softly; her breaths are steady.

The star-shaped scar on the side of her head is bigger, and slightly redder, than it was before.

Catra stares at her for several seconds, then looks up at Shadow Weaver accusingly.

“You didn’t have to hurt her,” she says, and hates the way her voice cracks. “She barely remembered anything.”

“One _sentence_ is enough,” Shadow Weaver snaps, her shadows billowing around her, and unthinkingly, Catra shies away. “Besides, she won’t remember it,” she adds with a flippant wave of her hand, then leans forward, eyes narrowing. “You, however—”

“I won’t tell her,” Catra snaps before Shadow Weaver can level the accusation. “How dumb do you think I am?”

_Hey Adora, I was the coward who watched you get your mind wiped. Hey Adora, you’ve been living a lie this whole time and I’ve been continuing it. Hey Adora, I miss you, did you know that? It’s exactly the same, but it’s different now because of all the things you don’t know and I can’t stand it._

Shadow Weaver leans back with a sneer. “Would you like me to answer that question? Or shall I prove it to you through other means?”

Catra glares at her, tail whipping back and forth. “You don’t have to prove anything,” she hisses through gritted teeth. “Just—let me keep an eye on her, okay? Or are you _trying_ to give her brain damage?”

For a moment, she thinks she’s gone too far. Shadow Weaver raises a threatening hand, and Catra draws back, fear rising in her throat, but it never falls. After a second, Shadow Weaver sniffs and turns away, letting her hand fall to her side. 

“Do not test me, Catra,” Shadow Weaver calls smoothly as she glides from the bathroom. “I will not hesitate to remind you of your place.”

Catra opens her mouth to respond, but before she can think of anything good, Shadow Weaver is gone, nothing left to recall her presence but the light flickering on and off above the sink.

**_Ten years earlier:_ **

“Catra, wait up!” 

Catra doesn’t wait up. Instead, she twists around, shoots Adora a devilish grin, and launches herself to a nearby pipe descending from the ceiling.

This is the one thing Catra likes about the Fright Zone—it’s crowded. Pipes and panels—all perfect handholds—plaster the ceilings and walls, and the hallways, more often than not, are a mess of crates and other various pieces of equipment, like somebody moved in years ago and never bothered to unpack.

The other cadets don’t like it, she knows. Kyle, especially, spends his time tripping and stumbling over equipment, and never manages to outrun the instructors when they decide it’s time to divvy up punishment. Catra, however, loves it.

The pipes on the ceilings are perfect places to hide. The panels provide plenty of handholds, and Catra, with her natural agility, can jump higher than the others, scurry faster between crates and equipment and all the other things that litter the hallways. She’s fast, she knows this, and all her life, she’s been outrunning.

It’s the one thing she’s good at, and she uses it.

“Catch up, slowpoke!” she yells over her shoulder, and hears Adora huff, but doesn’t bother looking back. They’re not even running from anything today, but just playing, except to Catra, all of a skinny eight years old, running might as well be a competition she needs to win.

Everything is a competition in the Fright Zone. Catra realized that early, but took too long figuring out what to do with it, and by the time she decided she wanted to win, the others had learned the same lesson, through bruises and training and mis-aimed punches. Now, even though she’s neck and neck, she feels like she’s playing catch up.

And Adora is always winning. Except in moments like these.

“You’re—so—fast,” Adora puffs as Catra finally reaches the end of the hallway and drops to the floor right in front of her, tail lashing gleefully back and forth. “How do you do that?”

Catra shrugs, but inside, she’s glowing. “Oh, you know. I’m just a natural. Besides—” she pokes Adora on the shoulder— “somebody’s gotta be ahead.”

Adora scowls at this, but as usual, it’s entirely good-natured. Catra can’t stand that sometimes. Sure, Adora is as competitive as anybody else—moreso, even—but she’s also got an easy smile and the sort of friendliness that drives Catra crazy, and makes her afraid all at once.

Afraid, because sometimes, when she gets called out, or punished, or hurt by Shadow Weaver, she’s worried that Adora will wake up and see the truth about her. That the words of the others will finally sink in, and Adora will shake her head and step away, and then Catra will finally be alone, just like everybody wants her to be.

Sometimes she pushes it, like pressing a bruise, just because she can’t help herself. Beats Adora in a race, and watches closely to see if this is it. Throws a punch too hard in training, and wonders if Adora will finally decide she’s too mean to hang around. Sometimes, her temper gets the best of her and she snaps, and then stands there wondering if that’s the final straw.

It never is, and it’s reassuring and frightening all at once.

“Can you teach me how to swing from the pipes like that?” Adora asks, still grinning, her gap-toothed smile wide enough to split her whole face, and Catra hesitates. She’s not sure she wants to give away her only advantage. Not to mention, she’s not even sure that Adora would be able to do the same things she can. For all her natural strength, Adora is pretty slow, or at least compared to Catra. She might not have the agility.

But if she refuses, Adora’s face will drop, and she’ll pretend she doesn’t care, but Catra will know that she does, and it will haunt her for days.

“Sure,” she says, her own grin a little hesitant, then looks around for a nearby pipe. “Uh, we’ll start small. What about that one?”

She points, and Adora follows her gaze, then visibly wilts.

“That’s a small one though,” she complains, and Catra has to resist rolling her eyes. “That’ll be easy.”

“Yeah, unless you can’t do it.” She steps past Adora, tail twining around her wrist to pull her along, and beckons. “C’mon. Try that, and then we can try that one.”

She points above them, to a pipe hanging high up near the ceiling, and Adora looks at it, then grins. 

“Awesome,” she says with a solemn nod, and at last acquiesces to following Catra to the low-hanging pipe.

It doesn’t take her long to master it. She struggles a little in the climb, and her legs swing wildly off-balance as she makes the leap from the stack of crates they’ve climbed up to the pipe nearby, but she does make it, even if Catra has to stifle a laugh at her ill-balance. She looks funny like that, and Catra’s proud, but she’s also a little relieved too. Clearly, Adora is never going to reach her natural agility. Her place is still secure.

“This is great!” Adora calls, knuckles white as they grip the pipe. “What do I do now?”

Catra leans forward and cups both hands around her mouth. “Jump to the next one!” When Adora looks back to her, she points. “Swing your legs really hard to get momentum!”

“Okay!” Adora calls, and she starts rocking back and forth, stubby legs kicking. “I’m gonna make it!”

“Yeah, you are,” Catra says, and she’s smiling as she says it, feeling for once in her life like she’s the one in charge, like she’s the one who knows what she’s doing. It’s sort of cool, teaching Adora a trick only she knows. Like sharing a secret.

“Okay,” Adora huffs, and Catra watches her grit her teeth, swing her legs one last time, and—

“What in heaven’s name are you doing?”

With a shriek, Adora’s fingers slip, and Catra watches, her heart leaping into her throat, as she plummets to the ground.

“Adora!” She scrambles off the crate, but it’s too late. Adora hits the ground hard, with a cry painful enough to rent the air apart, and curls inward with a sob. Even from this angle, Catra can see the funny bend of her ankle, and her blood runs cold.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” With one final leap, she hits the ground, claws clacking, and lunges for Adora’s prone form. _My fault_ dances in her head, along with _I’m in so much trouble_ and _Adora will never forgive me_.

But she never gets to finish those thoughts. She never even reaches Adora. Two meters from her form, Shadow Weaver gets to her first.

“Catra,” she hisses, her voice low and harsh in her ear, and Catra freezes. There’s nothing even holding her in place this time, no dark sorcery, but there’s no need; her own guilt does the job well enough.

Stock still, heart thumping, she swallows hard. “Shadow Weaver, I—”

“Are once again dragging Adora down for your own amusement.” Her voice slithers over Catra, dark and slimy, and she has to resist the urge to shudder away. Two meters away, Adora sobs quietly on the floor, but Shadow Weaver makes no move to help her. “Of course, I should have expected something like this out of you, but still, I’d hoped—”

Her hand squeezes Catra’s shoulder, nails digging into her flesh, and Catra has to bite her lip to keep a whimper from escaping. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she is, not only because of Shadow Weaver’s cold tones, but also because of Adora’s small form on the floor, her sobs by now having quieted to moans. 

_Why isn’t she helping her?_ she wonders desperately, and then thinks, _because she wants me to see it._

“Sorry will not be enough this time,” Shadow Weaver says, and her hand grips tighter around Catra’s shoulder, her nails sharp enough to cut her open, and Catra, with no recourse left, squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the blow.

Then Adora lets out a hiccuping sob, and the hand disappears in an instant. When she opens her eyes, Shadow Weaver is gliding towards Adora, her arms outstretched and the shadows sliding along around her. 

“Adora,” she sighs, and clucks her tongue as she scoops her into her arms. At Shadow Weaver’s touch, Adora sucks in a breath and clamps down on a sob—even then, Catra knows, she won’t show weakness—but her hands snake almost automatically around Shadow Weaver’s arm, and she clings as if on instinct.

Catra knows it’s probably not on purpose, knows it’s because Shadow Weaver treats her that way, like she’s special and delicate and has to be protected, except for the times when she’s strong and better and has to prove it, but she hates it anyway, with a fire that burns deep in her gut.

Anger and hurt and guilt curls her fists, and without thinking, she turns away.

Immediately, a shadow snakes out and wraps around her ankle, pulling so hard that she goes flying towards the ground. She hits hard, elbow banging off a crate with such force that tears of pain spring to her eyes and she has to swallow a cry, but behind her, Shadow Weaver just scoffs.

“You will not get off lightly, Catra.” Her voice oozes smooth warning. “You will report to your instructor for punishment. Tell him Shadow Weaver sent you.”

Catra almost wants to refuse, almost wants to shake her head and stand up and fight back, claws out, but the shadows flicker threateningly in her peripheral vision, and she knows that she can’t.

“Yes, Shadow Weaver.” Her voice is small, and she hates it. Shadow Weaver doesn’t even bother answering. The shadows simply recede, and Adora’s shaky breaths fade, and by the time Catra looks around, she’s alone.

She almost lies about the punishment, but the instructor catches her not an hour later, and faces her off in a sparring session so brutal that by the time she finishes she’s covered in cuts and bruises and struggling not to cry. She troops back to the barracks, chest quivering, not-quite-tears gathering at her eyes, and when she enters she finds Adora waiting on her cot, her back to Catra and her leg propped up in a shiny white cast, the kind Lonnie once wore when she broke her arm. Lonnie, Catra recalls, didn’t go to Shadow Weaver, but went to the regular medbay. She’s not sure which is worse.

For a moment she just stands there, unsure if she should even approach. Probably, Adora doesn’t even want to talk to her, and she’s not even sure she wants to talk to Adora after what Shadow Weaver did. Not when Adora is just proven to be her favorite, and Catra the nuisance, the drag-behind.

Then Adora draws in a shaky breath that might be a sob, and Catra breaks.

“Adora?” She approaches cautiously, silently, freezing slightly as Adora jumps, then twists around.

“Oh, hi, Catra.” Her face is glum, her skin drawn pale. Her toes, poking out of her cast, wiggle slightly like she’s desperate to move them around. “Are you okay?”

For a moment, Catra doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Then, she notices the wetness on her cheek, and hurries to wipe it away.

“Yeah,” she lies, and, with a moment’s hesitation, comes over to the bed and perches lightly on the edge, a good two feet away, just in case. Adora looks at her, then looks back to her cast, and sighs.

“I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” she says. Her lip is sticking out, trembling slightly in that way she has when she’s trying not to cry. “I was being stupid. I’m not as good of a jumper as you are.”

“What?” Catra stares, then quickly shakes her head, all her anger draining in an instant. “Don’t be dumb, Adora. It’s not your fault. It’s—”

_Mine_ , she thinks. _My fault, always my fault, just like Shadow Weaver says, and if Adora sticks around me I’ll ruin her too—_

“Shadow Weaver’s fault,” she says, and when Adora looks up in surprise, eyes widening like Catra has just used one of the curses some of the older cadets say, she gives a sure nod. “Yeah. I mean, you had it, didn’t you? Then she shouted and we both got distracted.”

“Oh.” Adora’s mouth forms silently around the syllable, as if she’s never considered the idea before. She hesitates, glances to the door, then leans in like she’s got a secret to share.

“She told me it was your fault, but I didn’t believe her.” Her eyes are hard and determined, like she’s actually rebelling, when Catra could have told her ages ago that rebelling takes a lot more than that. “You didn’t even do anything.”

“Yeah.” Catra nods, but her heart is sinking, because now she knows the truth. The things Shadow Weaver is whispering to Adora, without Catra there to counteract them, and who knows when Adora will start to believe? When she’ll shed Catra like outgrown clothes, leaving her for the waste bin, or worse, the labor camps. 

Desperate for a change of subject—she doesn’t think she can stand to hear what else Shadow Weaver said—her eyes fall to Adora’s cast, and she seizes upon it triumphantly. “Did it hurt? Fixing your leg?”

Adora hesitates, opening her mouth, then closing it again like she’s not sure she should say. She always gets like this, Catra knows, when it comes to pain. Can’t tell the truth, as if she’ll be found out for feeling it.

“Yes,” she admits after a long moment, shoulders sagging. “She did this thing like—” she raises her hands and mimes jerking two objects together, then shudders. “Said she had to set it. And it hurt so bad I almost screamed but she said if I screamed I’d—”

She breaks off and goes silent, eyes on the floor, biting her lip. Catra only watches her, her chest tight, unsure what to say.

Of course it would hurt. Even for her star pupil, though Shadow Weaver has been sweet, she has never been kind.

“What about you?” After a moment, Adora raises her eyes to meet Catra’s, then moves them worriedly over her smattered bruises and scrapes. “Did it hurt for you? Are you okay?”

Catra hesitates. Half of her wants to give in, to curl up and cry until Adora rubs behind her ears and she purrs until they both fall asleep, and things will be alright. But she’s already done enough damage, hasn’t she? Already entangled Adora in enough of her stupid plans.

“I’m fine,” she lies, and pretends to flex a muscle. “Takes a lot more to get me than that stupid instructor, you know.”

Adora giggles, small like she doesn’t want to be heard, and Catra’s heart swells about ten sizes too big. She drops her arm, then inches closer and wraps it instead around Adora.

“Besides,” she says, swallowing as Adora leans in closer and her heart skips a beat, “somebody had to show him a thing or two.”

Adora laughs again, so hard she snorts, and the sound is like music to Catra’s ears, all sweet and shy and hiccuping, and in that moment, sitting on her bed, it really is okay. It’s just the two of them, sure, but Catra has Adora, and Adora has Catra, and what else will they really need, anyway?

They’ll have each others’ backs, for as long as it takes.

_**Five months earlier:** _

Catra catches her when she falls.

It happens so suddenly, she doesn’t even have time to shout out. She barely has time to feel her own fear, the shock like a lightning strike through her heart. One second, Shadow Weaver is across the room. A second more, and she’s right in front of them, grabbing Adora by the arm and yanking her forward, so hard she stumbles.

She’d been expecting them, is the thing that Catra hates. Somehow, when Catra and Adora had made their way through the door, Adora with her hands tied and Catra leading the way, Shadow Weaver had been right there, waiting. Catra hadn’t even had time to work out a plan.

She always knows, Catra thinks with a plummeting heart. She always knows.

“Ow!” Adora shouts in surprise, her ties jerking loose under the force of the grip, and in that moment she’s not all of nineteen years old, a defected Force Captain and the supposed hero of the Rebellion, but the gawky, gap-toothed girl Catra grew up with, helpless under the whim of Shadow Weaver’s forceful hand.

And Catra doesn’t defend her. Not that she should—they aren’t on the same side anymore, after all—but it’s not because of that. Rather, it’s pure, stupid, senseless fear that roots her to the spot, the same fear that gets her when Shadow Weaver yells, or raises a hand, or uses that special tone of voice.

Fear makes children of them all. She recalls reading such a phrase in a book once, and hates how apt it sounds in the moment.

“Adora, just do what she says,” Catra manages, hating the smallness of her voice. “We made a deal.”

“That you did,” Shadow Weaver croons, her voice honeyed and slick. “And I am simply ensuring your cooperation.”

“I made a deal with Catra, not you!” Adora is still resisting, trying to jerk away, but Catra has been in Shadow Weaver’s grip enough times to know it’s like iron. “Catra—”

“Catra understands that you are both doing what is right for the Horde,” Shadow Weaver says sharply. “And she won’t interfere. Won’t you, Catra?”

And she looks at her, really looks at her, in that way she has, that makes it seem as if there’s no mask between her eyes and Catra’s soul. Like she’s looking right through and digging out all the bits and pieces, the good and the bad and the weak and the small and every way she can fight back and all the ways she won’t.

Catra never fights back. She’s long since learned that it will simply get her hurt. Instead, she works around her.

But then again, Adora never fought back for her either.

When she doesn’t answer, Adora twists around to look at her, eyes wide and pleading. “Catra, you can’t—I thought—”

“You’re a Horde defector, Adora,” Catra says. “And you made a promise.”

Her voice comes out harder than she means it, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe she’s supposed to be hard, to fight for the Horde by tooth and by claw, to eschew old friendships and take the means to victory for herself. Adora is, after all, her prisoner. Shadow Weaver is still Catra’s superior. She still dangles power over her head like a carrot on a stick.

But this time, maybe, Catra can grab it.

“Catra—” Adora’s eyes go round, pain and betrayal flashing across her face, and Catra has to resist the urge to close her eyes, because she can see the fear too. Adora, Catra knows, despite her status as the golden child, has always feared Shadow Weaver. When she was younger, she couldn’t figure out why. It took her years and a couple of incidents to realize that some things happened beyond even her excellent hearing.

A cooing voice, a broken bone setting with a snap. Catra wasn’t there, but she can see it sharply in her mind’s eye.

“Adora,” Shadow Weaver hums, her voice sickly sweet, and even as Adora struggles, she draws closer, a hand gently tracing her chin. “Honestly, I’m disappointed. I expected a braver face than the one you’re showing.”

“I don’t care about what you expect!” Adora shouts, but she’s still trying to wrench away and her chest is heaving and she looks scared, she looks—terrified. “Catra, listen to me, we had a deal—”

“Shadow Weaver will fulfill the deal,” Catra says, and before Shadow Weaver can refute such words she steps forward, pinning her with a sharp glare. “Right, Shadow Weaver?”

If her glaring has any effect, Shadow Weaver doesn’t show it. Rather, she draws herself up to her full height, Adora still caught in one hand, and allows the shadows to billow behind her, threatening.

Without thinking, Catra takes a step back.

“Do not worry, Catra.” Her voice hisses, teeth clicking together. “I am a woman of my word. Adora’s little friend—” one finger strokes her wrist— “will be healed, and in return, Adora will fulfill her part of the bargain.”

“We haven’t talked about that yet,” Adora says through gritted teeth, her hands curled into white-knuckled fists. “I don’t even know—”

“Oh, but you needn’t worry about that.” With one, impossibly strong arm, Shadow Weaver wrenches Adora closer, forcing her to stumble to her side. Then she turns, and bends down slightly so as to be eye-level.

Adora, as if on instinct, straightens, and Catra almost wants to laugh. An enemy of the Horde, and she still stands at attention for Shadow Weaver.

“You know what your future will be, don’t you, Adora?” The hand leaves Adora’s wrist, and comes again to trace her cheek, but Adora doesn’t move away. Catra isn’t even sure why. Instead, her eyes, round with fear, follow the movement, and she sucks in a breath. “You will return to the Horde. You will become the Force Captain you were always meant to be. You will fight, and when the time comes, you will stand at Lord Hordak’s side.”

Her eyes still on the hand moving up her cheek, Adora shakes her head. “That’s not what I agreed to. Catra and I said we’d—”

“ _Catra_ does not have a say in this!” Shadow Weaver thunders, and without thinking, Catra flinches. Adora does too, and in response, Shadow Weaver gently catches her shoulder.

“Now, Adora.” Her hand moves once more up her face, then, in an almost motherly fashion, pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. “It would befit you to cooperate.”

“Cooperate with wha—” Adora starts to say, but doesn’t have time to finish. Quick as a flash, Shadow Weaver’s fingers move to her temple, pressed to her skin, and before Catra can react, before she can even cry out, she pushes down hard.

The reaction is instantaneous. Adora’s eyes roll back in her head; her body shudders and jolts as if touching a live wire; her mouth opens in a silent scream.

And Catra, a scream of her own caught in her throat, can only watch in frozen horror.

Then, after an impossibly long time, Shadow Weaver clucks her tongue and takes her hand away. Immediately, Adora crashes to the floor. Or, almost. With a strangled cry, Catra lunges forward and catches her in her lap, her tail weaving protectively around her waist.

“What did you do to her?” she cries out, not even caring about the so very obvious tears in her throat. “What the hell was that?”

Shadow Weaver only turns away, waving a dismissive hand. “Nothing too complicated. I simply wiped her mind of the Rebellion. She’ll wake up in a few hours, and won’t remember anything beyond her promotion to Force Captain.”

Then she sighs, and turns back to face Catra. “Of course, her loss of memories and training will set her back considerably. We’ll have to brief the others, and arrange a cover story.” She tilts her head thoughtfully, one finger tapping her mask. “I don’t—no, I don’t believe she can keep her position as Force Captain.”

“Because I’m Force Captain,” Catra growls, and Shadow Weaver gives a flippant wave of her hand.

“Yes, I suppose we’ll have to keep you on probationary status,” she murmurs, ignoring the deep growl that builds in Catra’s throat. “No, we’ll have to work something out. Create a story. Perhaps an unsuccessful mission which led to her demotion.” She shrugs, then turns away. “No matter. Those are small details.”

Small details. Adora’s whole life, just small details. Her promotion, gone. The last almost-year of her life, erased.

Did it hurt? Catra wonders, and almost doesn’t want to ask.

“Did it hurt?” she asks anyway, her voice small, and Shadow Weaver looks to her in surprise.

“Why does it matter?” she says coolly, head tilted in what might be genuine confusion. “She’s not your _friend_ , Catra. Though of course, I’m sure you’ll be relieved that things have returned to the way they should be. It is, after all, for the benefit of both of us.”

She’s telling the truth, but Catra hates it. It seems wrong, the whole thing of it, because as much as Catra wanted Adora to come back, she wanted her to choose. She wanted her to look at Catra and choose her, not because her friend was in danger, or because her mind had been wiped, but because she cared the way she always said she did.

But then again, since when has Catra ever gotten anything she’s wanted?

“Fine,” she growls, and only realizes then that she’s hugging Adora to her chest. She’s warm, her breathing quiet but steady. She can feel her heartbeat fluttering beneath her dirtied red jacket. “Where should I take her? The barracks?”

Shadow Weaver scoffs, as if Catra is an idiot. “I think not. No, take her to the medbay. When she wakes up, we’ll brief her on her disastrous failure at Thaymor. Of course, she’ll probably be injured—”

She makes a funny movement with her hand, so quick Catra can’t follow it, and in her hands, Adora shudders, sucking in a breath. When Catra looks down, it’s to find an enormous bruise blooming across her face, a burn swelling slowly across her arm, and chunk torn out of her jacket sleeve, under which red slowly stains.

Above her, Shadow Weaver hums in indecision. “It may not be enough. Here—”

“No!” Catra cries out, pulling Adora close as if to shield her with her own body, even though she knows there’s no shielding from sorcery. When she looks up, Shadow Weaver has paused, and is watching her with narrowed eyes.

“Careful, Catra,” she says softly. “I wouldn’t want to raise suspicion about your…fondness for her.”

Catra only glares at her, an awful lump caught in her throat. “I’m not fond,” she hisses, voice low, “but you’re being needlessly cruel. She’s injured enough.”

For a moment, they face each other like that, neither side moving, then Shadow Weaver lets out a short breath and turns away.

“Take her to the medbay.” Her voice is clipped, harsh. “Feed her the lie about Thaymor when she wakes up. I’ll alert the others.”

Then she turns, an obvious dismissal, and Catra hesitates only a moment before struggling to her feet, Adora sagging against her shoulder. She doesn’t look back at Shadow Weaver, but turns, heart pounding, and makes her way to the medbay. She’ll be there when Adora wakes up, she decides, and after that too. There’s not anything else she could do. Things are the same now, or back to normal, or maybe they’re different—she can’t really tell.

But either way, as usual, Adora needs her. And now, with things finally as they always should have been, Catra will be there every step of the way.

_**Present:** _

Four hours after the incident in the bathroom, Adora wakes up.

Catra is right by her side, perched at the foot of her bed with her knees tucked to her chest. When Adora shifts, then lets out a small moan, her head shoots up, and she has to swallow a hard, sudden lump.

She hadn’t been sure Adora would wake up. Of course, she’s pretty sure Shadow Weaver wasn’t trying to kill her, but she doesn’t trust magic. The four hours that she’s waited have passed like a slow-moving panic attack, her shaky breaths and lashing tail the only quiet sounds to break the silence.

It’s so stupid because, only a few months ago, she’d tried to kill her. Really, honestly tried, and now that she has her in her hands, she shouldn’t even care. Adora doesn’t matter to her, not the way that she once did. They aren’t _friends_ , but rather a captor and a pseudo prisoner of war. They may be on the same side again, but the history between them matters, and Adora has made her choices. Catra plans to stand by hers.

But she still, inexplicably, doesn’t want her to die. Not even by her own hand. Definitely not by Shadow Weaver’s. The thought that she might never wake up, that she’ll just slide peacefully into the next world without another word, has been enough to keep Catra caught on the edge of terror for the past several hours.

So when Adora finally opens her eyes, it takes all her effort to swallow the tears that rise in her throat.

“Mmm…where…Catra?” Adora opens one eye, then the other, and blinks in confusion. “Why—”

Then her eyes widen, and she jerks into a sitting position.

“I missed training, didn’t I?” Her eyes are wide, frantic, and Catra nearly laughs. Of course, Adora would worry about missing training. “Catra, I’m sorry, I’ll—”

“Adora, it’s fine,” Catra interrupts. She’s still curled up, she realizes, hugging her knees to her chest. She can’t quite bring herself to relax. “You didn’t miss training. Don’t you remember? You took a really hard hit to the head. The whole squad had to carry you out.”

Rather, the whole squad, as well as the instructor, had been briefed on the lie. They’d accepted it with solemn nods and no questions, not even Kyle, though Catra had seen Lonnie shoot a strange look towards Adora’s prone form. 

“Oh.” Adora relaxes slightly, then brings a hand to her forehead. “Maybe that’s why I…ow…”

“Are you okay?” Catra leans forward, uncurling slightly, one hand half raised, but Adora just nods, even as she cradles her forehead.

“Yeah, I just…” she shakes her head, a frown painting her face. “I dunno, I feel foggy. But that’s probably, you know. Because of the accident.”

She shoots Catra a weak grin, who returns an even weaker one. Her heart is beating fast, guilt twisting in her stomach, and for a brief moment, she wants to let it pour out of her. Confess the whole thing, all the way back to Thaymor and beyond, apologize over and over and over for letting Shadow Weaver do this to her, and then—

And then what? Leave, so Adora will never have to look at her again? Apologize, until Shadow Weaver gets wind and simply wipes her memory again, before booting Catra to the labor camps? Even if Adora believed her, she would never forgive her. They’ve always been united against Shadow Weaver. Now, Catra is playing into her hands, and she hates every second of it, but she can’t stop. 

She’s all tangled up in it now, and her hands are so dirty that she might as well plunge them deeper into the dirt. So she returns her grin, and swallows her guilt, and tries to pretend that it’s for the best. Because Adora is where she’s meant to be, before she got all confused. Before she found a destiny, which to Catra just sounds like another word for trap. 

Was Adora happy being She-Ra? she wonders. She doesn’t know. She never seemed happy, not really. Just annoyingly self-righteous, going on about how she was so much better for choosing the other side. For helping all those innocent people, never mind that she’d never helped the innocent people within the Horde. Never mind that she’d never helped Catra.

“So…” Adora is watching her, looking all sheepish and apologetic, like it’s _her_ fault this has happened, and Catra can’t help but notice that that same lock of hair has fallen into her face again. She looks all mussed and sleepy, like she’s just woken up from a four hour nap rather than an induced mindwipe, and Catra, despite her best instincts, can’t help but notice how pretty she looks.

Then she gives herself an internal shake, because she shouldn’t be thinking things like that. Not now, not like this, in the strange positions they’re in. And even in any other situation, it wouldn’t matter, because Adora doesn’t think of her like that. She’d shut the lid on it pretty effectively, years ago, and Catra has never bothered looking back.

“So what?” she asks, trying hard to play it cool. She feels like she’s been flung through a whirlpool of emotions, and yet it’s only been a few hours since that idiotic lecture.

“So, are you hungry?” Adora asks. She’s watching Catra with a strange, indecipherable look. “Wait—what time is it, anyway?”

“Uh—” Catra winces. “You actually missed dinner. Sorry, I would have saved you some, but—”

_I didn’t want to leave your side._ “I wasn’t that hungry, so I didn’t go.”

It’s a bad lie, and Adora sees right through it. Catra would never miss a meal, not when she’s grown up on the occasional forced starvation as punishment.

“Catra.” Adora’s voice is hard. Catra just gives her an innocent look.

“What?”

“Please tell me you didn’t skip dinner because of me.”

“What? No!” Catra scoffs. “C’mon, Adora, you really think I like you that much?”

This is closer to their usual back and forth, and Catra falls into it so comfortably that it’s almost odd. Like she’s pulled on a glove that shouldn’t quite fit, but does anyway. 

But Adora, unexpectedly, doesn’t respond like she usually does. Instead, she cocks her head and studies her, that same indecipherable look on her face.

“You did, didn’t you?” A slow, triumphant smile is spreading across her face, as if she’s caught her out, when in fact, Catra has given her nothing. “You skipped dinner for me!”

“I did not!” Catra exclaims, but Adora is shaking her head, still smiling, and now an inexplicable flush is staining her cheeks.

“You’re an idiot,” she says, then leans back and crosses her arms. “Guess you just love me that much.”

“I do _not_ ,” Catra protests, but the words come out all funny and wrong, breathless like she can’t find her air. This should be a normal conversation between the two of them, she knows, but Adora’s words have hit her like a sparring staff right between the ribs, and she can’t seem to catch her breath. Because she knows what Adora doesn’t, and she knows all about Adora’s betrayal, and her other life, and her _choices_ , and Adora doesn’t even realize that she’s done so much to hurt her. And that maybe, sitting here on Adora’s small, hard bed, nothing but a pillow and a blanket and an eon of wiped memories between them, she’s starting to realize that she does love Adora a little bit, but it’s all twisted and wrong, because she can’t love her back. And even if she did love her back (which she doesn’t), they’re on opposite sides of a gulf that can’t be crossed. Not with the past behind them, and the scrubbed clean future ahead.

Maybe Catra’s an awful, no-good, _evil_ waste of space, but she’s not a monster. Adora, for all the things she’s done, might as well be innocent. And Catra, now that she’s got her life in her hands, can’t hurt her any more.

It’s funny, because all she wanted for a long while was power, and now that she has it, she can’t bear to use it.

“Catra?” Adora is watching her, her stupid, smug smile dropping into a frown. “Are you okay?”

Catra swallows hard, her mind spinning, and forces herself back to reality. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just starving. Because as Force Captain, I had to stand guard over your unconscious body for hours.”

“Hey!” Guilt flashes across Adora’s face—of course, she would feel guilty—but then it disappears into mock outrage. “You could have left!”

_No, I couldn’t have_ , Catra thinks, but out loud she says, “So you could roll off the bed and get another concussion? Thanks, but no.”

Adora scowls and throws her pillow at her, but Catra just catches it and manages a laugh. Her heart is pounding hard, both with fear and realization, and she thinks it’s probably good she missed dinner, because she feels like she’s going to puke. 

“Yeah, well.” Adora reaches out and snags the pillow from Catra’s thoughtless grip, then hugs it to her chest. “Just don’t miss any more for me, okay? You don’t have to worry, seriously.” She frowns, worry crinkling her brow. “Sometimes I feel like everybody’s waiting for me to mess up again, and I just…” She hugs the pillow harder. “I want to prove I can do things right.”

“You can,” Catra says, and the words taste bitter in her mouth, because she knows that Adora doesn’t have a choice. If she messes up, or remembers, or does anything that doesn’t fit into Shadow Weaver’s perfect image, she’ll be mindwiped again and again until there’s nothing left, until she’s just a shell in a soldier’s body, fighting and sparring and following orders, with no thoughts in that stupid head of hers.

“Yeah, maybe.” Adora stares at the bedsheets between them, her gaze lost, then gives a visible shake and looks up. “Hey, want to sneak unto the kitchens and find some gray ration bars?”

Catra smiles, and wonders if she should tell Adora that she’s long since figured out where they keep the real food.

“Sure,” she says, and her heart aches with the word. “But if we get caught, you’re attending all my training lectures.”

Adora grins, and it’s so pretty Catra’s chest cracks right in two. “Deal.”

**_Four years ago:_ **

It took Catra a long time to look at Adora any different, but maybe that was because she was looking at her the same way all along.

When she was five and they were just starting basic defense, Catra mastered the gymnastics faster than anyone else, and Adora looked at her like she was the coolest person ever, and in that moment, Catra really felt it, like she could walk on clouds and not fall through. 

When she was six, she started sleeping in Adora’s bed, because it was warmer with two, and even if sometimes Adora’s feet kicked into her side, it kept away the nightmares she’d have about Shadow Weaver and her terrible sorcery.

When she was eight and Adora broke her ankle— _her fault, always her fault_ —she stayed stuck to her side for two weeks, and nearly came to blows more than once when they tried to force Adora back into training early. 

When she was twelve, nothing changed, but all of a sudden, Catra noticed things. Like Adora’s smile, or her snorting little laugh when she found something particularly funny. Like how she could do more push ups than anybody else, and how she always looked pretty, even when she was soaked in sweat and covered in bruises, some of them applied by Catra herself.

She never talked about these things. Instead, she held them close to her chest like a deck of cards, counting them late at night when nobody could see, and wondering if it was normal to think these things, to feel these things.

At fourteen, two years after she started to feel that strange, fluttering way, something happened.

Adora doesn’t get nightmares. At least, Catra doesn’t think she gets nightmares, because why would she? She’s Shadow Weaver’s golden child, and the star cadet of the entire squad—no, the entire unit. She has nothing to worry about, not like Catra does.

So one night, when Catra wakes up to small, muffled sniffling noises, it takes her a long moment to realize they’re coming from the head of the bed.

“Adora?” She pokes her head up and blinks into the darkness. Adora’s form is a huddled lump at the top of the bed, her knees drawn to her chest and the blankets bunched around her.

Adora doesn’t answer, but she does go completely quiet, and that’s how Catra knows she’s awake.

“Hey,” Catra calls softly, and when Adora doesn’t answer, uncoils herself from the bottom of the bed and sits up. “Are you okay?”

“M’fine.” Adora’s reluctant voice comes muffled from beneath the covers. “Go back to sleep, Catra.”

Catra scoffs. “No way,” she whispers, and before Adora can protest, she creeps up to the top of the bed, settling hesitantly at Adora’s side.

“C’mon,” she whispers. This close, her nose is practically touching Adora’s hair, and her heart, for reasons unclear, is beating fast. “Tell me what’s up.”

Adora takes a shaky breath. “It’s stupid.”

“No it’s not,” Catra says immediately. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Adora says, but then she pauses, and lets out a sigh. 

“It’s…” she stops, and Catra can hear the hesitation in her voice, the debate, and so she reaches out carefully, searching for her hand. She finds it under the covers and grasps it, such a thoughtless gesture of comfort that it takes her a moment to recognize the hitch of breath, not as her own, but as Adora’s.

“It’s Shadow Weaver,” she says at last, and then tenses up, like she expects Catra to get angry. And Catra doesn’t, of course, because she would never side with Shadow Weaver anyway, but she does wrinkle her brow in confusion.

“You mean your lessons with her?” she says quietly, and Adora nods.

“I just…had a nightmare about them,” she admits, almost cringing away from Catra, and Catra wishes she could tell her that she doesn’t have to, that it’s okay, and she gets it, but all she can manage is a squeeze of her hand.

“Why?” she asks, curious despite herself. “I thought you said the lessons weren’t too bad?”

The lessons are a fairly recent thing, only about six months old. They happened for no apparent reason; one day, Shadow Weaver simply showed up during a sparring session and announced that once a week, she would be seeing Adora in her private office. And that was it; Adora had gone, and kept going, and soon it had faded into routine, no curious looks or questions needed.

She can practically hear Adora’s uncertainty, even if she’s facing away from her. Then she lets out a sigh, and rolls over to face Catra, her eyes shining softly in the darkness.

“They weren’t too bad at first,” she whispers, each word guilty, as if she’s afraid Shadow Weaver herself will appear in the middle of the night. “She tried to show me some stuff with magic at first, but I didn’t really get it, so she moved on to battle tactics and stuff. Like strategy.”

Catra nods—this makes sense. Even at their young age, whispers are starting to circulate about Adora’s potential, and it’s common knowledge that she’s being groomed for Force Captain.

Catra would be lying to say she isn’t bitterly jealous, but it’s something she can put aside, or at least in moments like these.

“Like commander stuff?” she can’t resist asking anyway, and Adora nods.

“Yeah,” she whispers, then bites her lip, as if uncertain about the next words. Catra stares. “I actually really liked it at first. You know I like that kind of stuff.”

Catra nods—Adora’s favorite class is strategy and tactics—and she continues.

“But once it got harder, I started messing up, you know?” Her brow furrows at the memory. “And at first Shadow Weaver would just get frustrated with me, and sometimes she would yell, but not even too bad. But then I kept messing up more and more, because it got really hard, and she started to—”

She breaks off, cheeks staining red as if embarrassed, and drops her gaze. Catra, heart pounding in her throat, reaches out gently to touch her arm.

“Adora.” Her voice is hard with fear, her chest already burning with the embers of rage. “Does she punish you?”

_I’ll kill her_ , she thinks, her thoughts flying hot and furious. _I’ll claw her whole face apart and I’ll keep going until she’s dead, until she’s—_

But Adora hesitates, as if she’s unsure. “It’s not—she doesn’t hit me or anything,” she says, and Catra’s whole chest caves in with relief. Of course, she knows Adora is no stranger to the occasional blow—some of the instructors are particularly nasty with punishments—but Shadow Weaver is different. Shadow Weaver hits harder, and crueler, and keeps her nails sharp enough to scratch. 

“Then what does she do?” she asks, because she can’t think of anything worse. Or at least, that’s what’s always scared Catra the most, more than the yelling and the threats. Words are empty. Fists hurt.

Adora sucks in a breath, then lets it out slowly.

“If I mess up, she sort of—freezes me,” she explains slowly, like she’s puzzling out the description of it as she goes. “And then she sort of—goes into my mind and she puts all these things there, of all the things that’ll happen if I keep messing up.”

“Like what?” Catra asks, even though her heart is thumping against her ribcage, her throat going dry.

“Like bad things,” Adora says, and her eyes are glistening now, like she’s trying to hold back tears. “Like—I dunno, Catra. Like she shows me wars and people fighting and dead bodies, and tells me about all the people that could die if I don’t—if I don’t—”

“Hey.” Catra reaches out to touch her shoulder, drawing Adora’s gaze back to her. She’s sharply aware of how close they are together, their bodies just shy of touching, but forces herself not to focus on that. “It’s okay. Seriously. Shadow Weaver’s a huge liar, you know that, right?”

But Adora just shakes her head, her lip caught between her teeth. “But she’s right, Catra. If I mess up as a Force Captain, or even as a soldier, people might die, and then it’ll be all my—”

“It won’t be your fault,” Catra says firmly. “Seriously. There’s like a billion Force Captains out there, Adora. You’re not going to be the one calling every single shot.”

She hesitates, then bumps her shoulder to Adora’s. “Besides, you’ll have me catching all the stupid decisions.”

At that, Adora smiles, really smiles, and relief fills Catra’s chest.

“Maybe you’re right,” she mumbles, her head sagging back into the pillow. Her hair is falling in her face, Catra notices suddenly, and she resists the urge to push it away. “If it’s two of us, it’ll be fine, right?”

“Yeah.” Catra smiles. “And it’s got to be two of us, right? I mean, you’re stuck with me.”

She means it as a joke, but she’s afraid, for a moment, that Adora will take it seriously. That she’ll wrinkle her nose at the idea, then pull away the hand firmly clasped in Catra’s.

But she doesn’t. She just giggles quietly, and tightens her grip.

“You mean you’re stuck with me,” she says, and it’s such a peculiar idea to Catra that she almost laughs. Stuck with Adora? As if she’d want to ever leave? As if she has anybody else she’d ever take the time of day to care about? The idea is utterly bizarre.

But she doesn’t know how to say that. Instead, she just shakes her head. “You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah, but I’m your idiot,” Adora teases with a grin, and Catra’s heart stops. Then it starts again, pounding faster than ever before.

“Huh?” is the incredibly elegant response her brain forms, before she swallows and tries again. “I mean—you’re not mine. Or anybody’s.”

“Oh, well, yeah.” Adora frowns. “But I mean, who else would I choose? Everybody else is lame.”

_But I’m not_ , Catra thinks, and her heart sings. “Okay, that’s true,” she concedes, and all of a sudden notices that, not only are their hands still intertwined, but hers is hideously sweaty. “Everybody is lame. Too bad you count.”

“Hey!” Adora whispers in mock outrage, but she’s smiling too hard to make it worth anything, and even though Catra can barely make her out in the darkness, all she can think is that she’s too pretty to look at, but she also can’t look away.

“You _are_ lame,” Catra counters, because she can’t think of anything else to say. “It sucks that I have to do all the work to make us look cool.”

Adora scoffs. “Oh, like you’re cool. C’mon, Catra. Once you ran away from a mouse.”

“Hey!” Catra whispers in mock offense. “I’m cooler than you, you know. Way cooler.”

“Oh, really?” Adora says, and raises an eyebrow, a clear challenge. “Prove it.”

“Fine,” Catra shoots back, even though she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to prove it, but that doesn’t even matter, because she’s too occupied by the space that feels like it’s narrowing between them, like gravity catching a falling star, and all she can do is fall, fall, fall, until she finally gets the courage to do the thing she’s wanted to do all along.

She leans forward, and kisses her.

It’s quick—only a second, maybe less. Then she pulls back, heart pounding, and wonders if she’s made the biggest mistake of her life.

Maybe she has. Because Adora is staring at her in utter shock, and for a moment it’s so terrible, like she’s gambled all the money in the world and lost, and she can’t believe how much of an _idiot_ she is, how _stupid_ , and that’s when Adora leans forward and kisses her back.

It’s Catra’s turn to be surprised. She stares, stunned, when Adora pulls back, and Adora just laughs, that silly little snorting laugh of hers. 

“Did you—” Her mouth can’t seem to move. “Did you just—?”

Adora nods, a small, smothered grin on her face. “Yeah.”

Catra stares. And stares. Then she kisses her again, and this time there’s no shock, just sweetness, and it’s maybe the best thing she’s ever done, better than the food she’s stolen or time she got number one of the week in personal combat, or when she beat everybody, even Adora, on an end of course exam. 

They go back and forth that night, trading short, shy kisses until they fall asleep, and giggling in between, and when they wake up, tangled in each others’ arms, they’re late to training and Shadow Weaver is standing in the doorway.

“Get up,” she hisses, and they shoot apart as if burned, scrambling to their feet and standing at attention before the bed.

“Shadow Weaver—” Adora starts, but Shadow Weaver silences her with a look so withering she cringes.

Then, she turns her attention to Catra.

“Catra.” Her voice is harsh with barely concealed rage. “Care to explain what you’ve done?”

“I—we were just sleeping!” she says, but she can tell immediately that it’s not going to cut it. Shadow Weaver’s glare is sharp enough to slice right through her, to cut open her brain and examine all the things she’s done, to pick her apart until she’s nothing but guilty bones.

“I don’t think so.” Shadow Weaver shakes her head and glides forward, the shadows slithering around her. They reach Catra and wrap around her ankles, rooting her in place much as she struggles. “I think, actually, that you’re lying. That you’re trying to cover up your actions, your impurity. However, I’m afraid that just to be sure, I’ll have to check for myself.”

“What do you—” Catra tries to lift a foot, but the shadows only pull her back down. Shadow Weaver approaches with slow menace, ignoring Adora, who stands frozen by Catra’s side, eyes wide in horror, and then she reaches out to cup Catra’s chin.

It’s not the way she touches Adora. It’s not gentle, and it’s not sickly-sweet. Rather, it trembles with barely concealed menace, her nails digging into Catra’s flesh. 

“I think,” she murmurs, her gaze roaming over Catra’s face, “I’ll have to see a few things.”

“What are you—” Catra starts to say, only to shudder to a halt, sucking in a breath as a Shadow Weaver’s finger presses hard to her temple. 

For a moment, she feels nothing. Then, without warning, a horrible presence climbs inside her mind, and before she can even react, before she can scream, she promptly blacks out.

She sees everything. She doesn’t know how, but she knows, in the way one knows in dreams, that Shadow Weaver has gone into her mind and picked apart all the details and private moments of the night they’d shared, lifted each one and put it under a magnifying glass.

It’s horrible. It’s invasive. It’s all she can do to be inside her own mind, frozen and helpless, and not scream and cry, because she can’t.

When she wakes up, Adora is cradling her. Tears are dripping onto her shoulder, and staining right through her shirt.

“I’m sorry,” she blubbers, her fingers gripping her tightly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t stop her, I didn’t know—”

“Enough with the theatrics.” Shadow Weaver’s cold tones cut through Adora’s sobs, and Catra feels Adora, as if on instinct, take one shuddering breath and shut up.

Ever the good little soldier. 

“Catra, you’re late for training,” Shadow Weaver says sharply, then extends one finger toward Adora. “Adora, you’re to come with me.”

“I—” Adora’s eyes go round. “Shadow Weaver, I’m late for training t—”

“You will do as I say, Adora.”

Catra doesn’t want her to go. She doesn’t want to move, but more importantly, she doesn’t want to be alone either, not with the hideous knowledge of what Shadow Weaver now knows. She wants to tell Adora this, to beg her to stay, but she knows that it will be no use.

Adora hesitates, then clambers slowly to her feet.

Shadow Weaver snaps her fingers impatiently, and Adora comes to her side, her face drawn with fear.

“Good girl,” Shadow Weaver coos, then shoots Catra one last ugly look. “Catra, pick yourself up off the floor. Or I’ll tell your instructor to add a punishment to your next training session.”

Then she’s gone, Adora trailing behind her, without even a look back. Catra watches them go, fear aching in her belly, then curls into a ball and sobs.

*

She goes to training. She has no choice. She goes, and she spars, and she sits through lessons, and the whole time her heart is thumping, her stomach is churning, and she can barely breathe.

When she gets back to the barracks, Adora is sitting on her bed, polishing her boots as if nothing had happened.

“Adora!” Catra’s heart jumps right into her throat. Without even thinking, she lunges for the bed and wraps Adora in a bone crushing hug.

“Whoa!” Adora laughs in surprise, and after a moment, returns the hug with a vague air of confusion. “Okay, guess training was boring.”

“I was so worried,” Catra breathes, but it’s muffled into Adora’s shoulder, and when she looks up, Adora is staring at her, baffled.

“You know, my lessons with Shadow Weaver aren’t _that_ bad,” she says. Then a strange look crosses over her face, and she amends the statement. “Well, okay, they aren’t always amazing, but…”

“What are you talking about?” Catra pulls back, confusion temporarily overtaking concern. “What did she do to you?”

“Huh?” Adora stares at her, one eyebrow raised as if she’s trying to make heads or tail of the conversation, but isn’t quite getting it. “Catra, we just had a lesson. You know, like usual.”

“Yeah, but…” But of course. Adora is Shadow Weaver’s favorite, isn’t she? It makes sense that she would be spared. Not that it matters. At the moment, her relief is so strong that she doesn’t even care. “She didn’t do anything to you? About last night?”

“What about last night?” Adora asks, and Catra’s heart plummets.

So this is how it’s going to be, she thinks, and the blood in her veins turns cold. 

“You know,” she tries, but her hope is already draining away. “Adora, you know what I’m talking about.”

But Adora shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says, “I don’t.”

So it’s going to be like that. Whatever Shadow Weaver has done to her, she’s scared her into pretending that night never happened. Pretending that she doesn’t even like Catra anymore, or maybe she really doesn’t like Catra anymore, because maybe Shadow Weaver has finally convinced her it’s not worth it.

Maybe Adora has finally realized the mistake she’s made, and now she’s trying to cover it up by ignoring the fact that it ever existed in the first place.

Catra’s cheeks burn. Her stomach turns, and she wonders if it’s possible to throw up from sheer humiliation. She wants, she’s pretty sure, to die. 

Instead, she forces a grin. “Oh, you know,” she says, and maybe she’s a little too angry, but she can’t help the mean lilt she adds to her words. “Your stupid sleep fighting. I mean, c’mon. Who the hell are you trying to beat?”

Adora’s face clears immediately of confusion, and she opens her mouth to shoot back a response, but Catra isn’t even listening. Her whole head is spinning, her heart beating as if through putty, and she can barely summon back the strength to shoot back a response when Adora answers. All she can think about is whether Adora will ever look at her again, or if she’s given up completely, and maybe Catra should too.

No—who is she kidding? Of course she should give up. She should take the event and lock it away in a tiny box, just like Adora is doing, and pretend it never happened, because that’s clearly what Adora wants. And it’ll hurt—it already hurts—but it’s the only thing she can do. To do anything else is to lose Adora forever, and maybe she’s stupid and weak, but she can’t do that.

So she laughs at Adora’s next joke, and gives some response she doesn’t remember, and things slide back to normal, but they’re not. Because Catra, even though she tries to forget, remembers the night like a bad burn, and though she eventually comes back to sleeping on Adora’s bed, she never crawls up beside her again.

**_Present:_ **

“You wiped her memory, didn’t you?”

The realization comes upon Catra slowly, and at the same time, all at once. She’s not sure when the idea of it firms in her head, but three days after the incident in the bathroom, she’s standing at the entrance to the Black Garnet chamber and trying not to look like she’s a little afraid to be there, even though she always is.

Shadow Weaver, at her words, turns slowly.

“What are you talking about?” Her tone is utterly cold, completely dismissive. Normal, then. Catra swallows hard, summons up all her bravery and anger, and takes a step forward.

“When we were fourteen.” She hates speaking it out loud, hates making the event a reality. “When you…saw what happened. You took her away, and when she came back, she acted as if nothing had happened.”

Shadow Weaver, for a long moment, says nothing. She only eyes Catra, disinterested and sneering all at once, then turns away.

“It was necessary,” she says. “I was not going to stand by and allow you to manipulate Adora in such a way. Not when so much hung on the line.”

Anger, familiar and hot, curls up in Catra’s chest. Her hands tighten into fists, claws digging into her palms, and she stalks forward.

“You call that manipulation?” It’s useless to argue, she knows. Shadow Weaver will never change her mind, nor regret what she did. Even now, she’s smirking as she watches Catra approach, like she holds all the power. “We were fourteen! We were just—!”

And then her voice cracks and hurt shatters in her chest, years of feelings lost, and she turns away, her head down. 

“You saw what we were,” she mutters, and can’t even look at her. Pain and humiliation and disgust mingles in her gut, and the familiar urge to retch rises in her throat. 

She hates her. She hates her more than anything, but she’s working for her, digging her hands deeper into the mud, lowering herself to levels she’d never thought she’d reach and all because Adora left and she can’t stand it.

And now, by proxy, she’s done something so horrible to Adora that they might as well be even, but it doesn’t feel like it. It only feels ugly and unfair, like she’s taking advantage, when all she’s done is watch. 

Watch, and not lift a finger. Watch, because she’s too scared to fight back.

“Why didn’t you wipe my mind?” Something occurs to her and she spins around, claws still out as if she expects attack. Shadow Weaver doesn’t respond to her bristling stance. Instead, she only cocks her head, then sneers.

“I planned to catch you out,” she says, as indifferent as if she were stating a lunch menu. “One more attempt, and you would have been sent to a labor camp.” Her eyes flash then, displeasure rippling over her masked face. “Unfortunately, for once, you learned your lesson.”

So that was it. Pure chance, and she’d escaped a terrible fate. She stares, heart beating wildly, tossed between rage and the strange feeling that she’d narrowly avoided a bullet, and wonders if this is all her life is. Pure, stupid chance, just a pawn on a chessboard, and no matter how much she tries to claw her way to queen, she’ll surely never make it.

And Adora, poor Adora, doesn’t even know how to try. Not with her mind in pieces and Shadow Weaver stalking her every move.

“You’re a monster.” Her voice shakes as she says the words. “How can you—what kind of a person are you? I was fourteen!”

Shadow Weaver’s eyes flash and she moves forward, so quickly that Catra takes a step back.

“Fourteen is old enough to understand one’s place,” she hisses, her face inches from Catra. “Fourteen is old enough to know what’s best, and what…urges must be kept under wraps for the greater good. You, however, have always been a selfish child, insolent and weak, and you never cared enough about Adora to see what was best for her. It is a shame she attached herself to you so young. Had I been able to, I would have gotten rid of you years ago.”

The words hurt like individual knives, slicing into her ribcage. It’s like proof, after all these years, of what she always suspected but didn’t want to believe. That she really is nothing, worthless and small, and she’ll always be nothing if Shadow Weaver has anything to say about it. That she’s a sidekick, and Adora the hero, and maybe it’s better this way, because Adora might be the hero, but she’ll need Catra at her side, working to orchestrate everything around her. No memories, but she’ll have Catra, and maybe that will be enough.

But is it even worth it, she wonders, when Adora doesn’t remember anything that matters? With her whole life dedicated to the Horde, how will she ever have room for Catra?

How can Catra stand by, and watch her lose herself, piece by piece?

Shadow Weaver is still glaring at her, her gaze sharp and cold and quivering with rage, so Catra forces a nod.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she asks, just because she needs to know. She needs to hear the words, and then she’ll be free.

But Shadow Weaver laughs, and pulls away. “I don’t hate you, Catra,” she says as she glides to the Black Garnet. “I don’t regard you. You’re nothing more than a nuisance to me. That is all.”

It’s a terrible thing to hear, Catra thinks, her heart sinking, because it’s not even what she wants to hear. She wants catharsis, the final proof that Shadow Weaver really despises her, but instead, Shadow Weaver walks the line, taunting and teasing and never letting her break free. Pretending not to care, so she can turn around and scream like she does.

And maybe, Catra thinks with a weariness that borders on defeated realization, she shouldn’t be waiting for permission. If Shadow Weaver isn’t going to give her the confirmation she needs, or the praise she so wants to hear, maybe she shouldn’t even try to take it.

She has bigger things to worry about, she tries to think, but even that falls flat in her head, because really all she worries about is Adora.

“Fine,” she spits, and before Shadow Weaver can respond, turns away. “If that’s how it is.”

Behind her, Shadow Weaver scoffs, and it’s so cruel, that final noise, but Catra doesn’t rise to it. She just stalks through the door and turns on her heel, but she doesn’t go to the barracks. 

Instead, she goes to the main doors.

————

Adora catches her before she makes it to the main doors, and it’s such a strange role reversal of all those months ago that Catra nearly bursts out laughing.

“Catra?” Adora’s forehead wrinkles, and Catra stares at the expression, and wonders how she’s been so dumb this whole time. How she’s hated her so much, but really that hatred has been love hot enough to hurt, and she’s been twisting it all up inside of her until she can’t find heads nor tail.

She’s so dumb. She calls Adora the dumb one, but really Catra is the idiot, and Adora never had a chance.

“Hey, Adora.” She leans against the wall like she totally meant to be there, but she knows it won’t work. It’s so obvious that she’s sneaking out. “Shouldn’t you be in training?”

“Yeah, but—” Adora hesitates, and her eyes flick to the heavy doors at the end of the hallway. Catra can see her mind working, her brain putting two and two together. “You weren’t there, and you were supposed to lead it.”

Of course she was. She’s a Force Captain with responsibility, but in this moment she doesn’t care one whit about her responsibility, or the Horde, or anything she’s worked for. It all burns bitter on her tongue, paling in comparison to the stupid, complicated, unavailable person who stands before her.

“I forgot,” she admits, and crosses her arms in what might be taken as defensiveness. “What? I had a meeting with Shadow Weaver. It ran late.”

“Oh—yeah. Okay.” Adora nods, then takes a tentative step closer, almost hesitant, like she’s doing something she shouldn’t. “Are you okay? You look kind of sick.”

Without thinking, Catra bristles. “I’m fine!” she snaps, which is utterly a lie, but Adora takes a step back anyway, hands raising in apology.

“Sorry,” she says, and Catra immediately wants to take it back, to apologize and admit that she was lying and everything is twisted but she can’t tell her because it’s wrong, it’s all wrong— “I was just, you know. Worried.”

“You don’t have to be worried abut me,” she says miserably, hating the way her ears flatten against her head. Her stupid body, and all her stupid tells. “Really. I basically have everything I’ve ever wanted.”

Except she doesn’t, not at all, and the very thing she’s about to do might ruin her life further, but it doesn’t matter. _She_ doesn’t matter. Shadow Weaver is right.

She’s just a sidekick, and to make matters worse, she’s in love with the hero. 

“You don’t sound like it,” Adora points out with another step closer. She’s closer probably now than she should be, but the hallway is empty, and they’re half hidden behind a pile of crates anyway. In fact, Adora hesitates, then settles down on the closest crate and pats the space beside her. “C’mon. Want to talk about it?”

“What? No,” Catra replied immediately, but Adora just grins, that same grin she gets when she’s about to be all stupid and endearing in a way Catra always loses against. She kicks up her feet onto a piece of equipment, then leans back and puts her hands behind her head.

“Fine,” she says. “Guess I’ll just wait here all night.”

Catra only raises an eyebrow. “I can leave.”

Adora’s grin doesn’t falter. “I can follow.”

“Really?” Catra scoffs. “You’re just going to follow me around the entire Fright Zone like a puppy?”

“Yeah,” Adora responds, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “At least, until you tell me what’s up. And then we can sneak into the kitchens and steal some ration bars and blame it on Kyle.”

Catra just stares. This is hard, she’s realizing, harder than it has any right to be, because Adora is being entirely, comfortably, normal. Teasing and kind and indulgent, and all Catra wants to do is curl up beside her and purr until the ache in her chest goes away.

But it won’t, because the very problem is the person sitting right in front of her.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she says, only to scowl as Adora raises a disbelieving eyebrow. “Really!”

“Okay. Sure.” Once more, Adora pats the spot beside her. “C’mon, Catra. You can at least sit down.”

For a moment, Catra hesitates. She probably shouldn’t, she knows. This whole thing smells like a bad idea, especially because Catra is weak, and tired, and she has to be something entirely different now. She has to be strong, and bigger than Shadow Weaver, and that means not falling for a trap.

Adora is hardly a trap, but she’s an innocent, and that’s almost worse.

But she’s watching her, waiting, her expression slowly falling into disappointment, and Catra hates it.

“Fine,” she huffs, and plops down on the crate beside her, so close their legs are touching and she can feel the heat radiating through her side. The urge to purr immediately rises up in her throat, but she suppresses it. “What’s up, Adora?”

Adora laughs, and her hand comes up to scratch behind Catra’s ears. “What’s up with you?” she asks instead, and Catra swallows hard. The scratching is nice, a remnant of their childhood that hasn’t been rekindled since the mindwipe. Sometimes, she’s wondered if Adora had forgotten about it. If maybe, Shadow Weaver had taken more than just the rebellion.

“Nothing,” she manages, and Adora sighs.

“C’mon, Catra,” she urges, and her hand moves down Catra’s head, trailing over the back of her neck. It’s light enough to be absentminded, but she doesn’t pull away, even when Catra’s breath hitches. “Please. I know you’re upset about something. You’ve been sort of…off, the past few days.”

Catra just squeezes her eyes shut and tries to pretend she doesn’t feel the light touch of Adora’s hand on her neck, doesn’t feel her warm, worried gaze boring into her.

“No, I haven’t,” she lies, and Adora’s hand pauses. Then, she lets out a sigh.

“Liar,” she says, but it sounds all sad and wrong, disappointed rather than teasing. Catra hates it. She opens her eyes and looks at Adora, who’s watching her feet sadly, like it’s _her_ fault.

“Hey,” Catra says, and bumps her shoulder. When Adora looks up, she gives her a grin. “You don’t have to worry about me. Really. It’s just…hard, being a Force Captain. But I’m getting the hang of it.”

Adora’s eyes roam over her face, worried and not quite convinced, but after a moment she smiles tentatively in return.

“You’re sure that’s all?” she says, and Catra sets her jaw and nods. Sometimes, lying comes so easy to her that it’s almost better than the truth. Sometimes, like now, it’s like pulling teeth.

But Adora must buy it, because her smile grows slightly, then slides away like rain on a windshield.

“I wish I could do something to help, though,” she says, and Catra wishes she could tell her that this is enough, just sitting here and being the same kind person she always is, stripped free of the past and her memories and all the terrible things she’s done to Catra.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? It’s like a seesaw going back and forth, neither side balanced. If Catra does the right thing, or tries to, Adora will slip through her fingers. If Adora remembers, somehow, she’ll just hurt Catra all over again. 

They can’t stop hurting each other, and Catra has no idea how it’s gotten to this point, but she hates it all the same.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she says, but the lump in her throat belies any words she might say, and Adora clearly isn’t convinced.

“Are you sure?” she asks, and Catra nods, but Adora just bites her lip, her hand creeping back up tentatively, as if to scratch behind her ears.

“Yeah, but—” her eyes roam over Catra’s face, anxious and unsure, and it’s a strange dichotomy to have, the comfort of Adora’s hand behind her head warring with the bitterness of the truth under her tongue, and she can’t seem to swallow either one. She wants to lean back into her embrace, but such a thing teeters on the edge of peril, and she knows she can’t.

But her heart is beating fast and her eyes keep flickering to Adora’s lips, and dry anticipation is filling her throat, even though nothing is going to happen, nothing can happen.

Then Adora’s eyes crinkle in that way she gets when she gets an idea, and she leans forward slightly, her hand still cupping Catra’s head.

“Can I—try something?” she asks, and hesitates, waiting for a response. And Catra, frozen against her touch, does the stupidest thing in the world, and nods.

“What are you—” she starts to say, but doesn’t get to finish before Adora leans forward and presses her lips to hers.

For a moment she just hesitates there, as if waiting for Catra to pull away, except Catra can’t. She’s paralyzed in shock, and elation, and an entire maelstrom of other emotions, but none of those must play on her face because Adora seems to take the silence as a yes. When Catra doesn’t respond, she scootches forward and deepens the kiss with a little sigh, her hand pressed to the back of Catra’s head and her lips chapped and a little dry but it doesn’t matter, because they’re Adora’s lips, and Adora is kissing her, and Catra, before she knows what she’s doing, is kissing her back.

It lasts all of several seconds. Then, Catra jerks away, scrambling backwards in a panic.

“Adora—no—” she gasps, her mind reeling, her heart going a hundred miles a minute, her brain scrabbling for sense. This is wrong, she thinks dimly, all wrong because Adora doesn’t know, she doesn’t understand—

She definitely doesn’t understand. Because when Catra pulls away, she draws back too, horror and hurt flashing across her expression.

“Catra—I’m sorry, I didn’t think—” Her hand goes to her mouth and then she turns away, like she can’t even bear to look at her, though Catra knows it’s all her fault. She drew her in, and she manipulated her, just like Shadow Weaver said, because that’s who she is.

A monster.

“Adora, it’s fine,” Catra says, but Adora has her back to her now, so she reaches out cautiously, her hand brushing her shoulder. “Adora, please, it’s not—”

Then, with a moan, Adora doubles over, one hand clamped over her mouth.

“Adora?” Catra’s blood runs cold. For a moment, she’s frozen, caught in the terrible possibility of what this might be, and then Adora moans once more and sags, so low her head nearly hits her knees.

“I can’t—” She shakes her head slowly back and forth, her voice muffled through her palm. “Catra—did—”

“What?” Catra’s leaning forward, her chest taut, her breaths caught in her throat. “Adora, do you—”

Adora moans, her face twisting, and she runs a hand over her forehead, pressing as if she’s trying to recall. “Catra, I feel like something—there’s something—”

“You remember,” Catra says, and for a moment her heart leaps, her thoughts filling with relief, and then, just as quickly, she crashes. Because if Adora remembers—even a sentence, or a moment—

Catra’s life will be on the line, and if Catra’s life is on the line, then she’ll never complete her plan, and that means that Adora’s life will be lost too.

And that’s one thing she can’t gamble.

Which means she has to get out of here, and fast.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and scrambles to her feet, wincing when Adora shoots her a look of blearied, painful confusion. “I’m sorry, Adora, I can’t—I have to—”

The hallway is growing darker. She feels it, rather than sees it, and so too does she smell the first whiffs of sorcery in the distance, the hideous scent of Shadow Weaver’s magic.

“Wait—Catra!” Adora launches to her feet as well, only to sway and clutch her head, her face contorted in pain.

“I think I—” she gasps, and she looks terribly lost, terribly abandoned. 

By Catra.

“I have to go.” Catra is backing away, bumping into crates, tail flicking wildly. “I’m sorry, Adora, but I need to—I have to do something, and if she sees—”

Then it’ll be all over. She’ll never have the chance again.

“Catra, wait!” Adora calls, and her voice is high and frightened, but Catra doesn’t answer. It’s too late. The shadows are encroaching, and she’s nearly out of time.

She turns tail, and runs.

—————

It’s hard to find. Harder than she expects it to be. She fights through the Whispering Woods, the entrance of the castle itself, and then, it seems, every spider that survived her last encounter.

The sword is lying at the bottom of the cliff that Adora never fell from, and it takes over an hour for her to climb down it, cursing and sweating the whole way. It takes another two hours to climb out.

It takes nearly a day to make it back to the Fright Zone, but it’s nighttime when she comes back, and she slips inside easily. She’s always been good at coming and going when she pleases.

The barracks are nearly empty, which is an oddity in itself, before she remembers that they’re doing night maneuvers this week. The only bed occupied is Adora’s and as Catra approaches, her heart clenches at the sight. She looks incredibly worse for wear, with an enormous bruise across one cheek and marks around her collar, like she’d really struggled before Shadow Weaver had gotten her.

She’s breathing steady, her chest rising and falling slowly, and in that moment, she looks almost peaceful, though Catra knows that she can’t be. Not with her whole life locked away. Not with a destiny that Catra hates following her all the way back to the Fright Zone, held in the very blade that Catra now has strapped to her back.

Is it worth it? she wonders. Is she even doing the right thing? Part of her, still angry, still hurt, screams revenge. She wants to take the sword and throw it back down that cliff, then leave Adora for the dogs, just so she knows how it felt. To be abandoned by the one person she cared about. To be left for dead under Shadow Weaver’s thumb. 

To hurt, so much, her whole life. Sometimes, she doesn’t think she’ll ever escape it. And maybe she won’t. But that doesn’t mean, despite Shadow Weaver’s constant accusations, that she has to drag Adora down with her.

She steps forward until she reaches the bed, then carefully draws the sword from behind her and lays it on the hard mattress next to Adora. Adora doesn’t wake, but she does shift, her hand brushing the hilt, and when she does, the stone at its center glows a deep blue. It hits Adora’s fingers, and travels up her arm, over her body, sparking for two long seconds before sinking into her skin like water through clothes.

Catra stares. The whole thing is odd, and maybe entirely beyond her understanding. She’s starting to think, maybe, that there’s some parts of Adora that she doesn’t really understand, or some parts that she thought she did but maybe she didn’t, and maybe she can’t really parse out the person she thought she knew better than anyone. Maybe there are parts of herself that even Adora doesn’t know, parts that have been stripped away by Shadow Weaver, or buried by years of punishing reinforcement. And maybe it’s the same for Catra herself, that she doesn’t know who she is as much she thought she did.

Maybe she has a lot to figure out.

Adora stirs slightly, but doesn’t wake. Her fingers fall from the hilt, and her mouth opens slightly, breath whistling in and out, moving the lock of hair that always falls into her face. Catra stares at her, but makes no move to touch her, or approach the bed. Instead, she swallows hard, and tears fill her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and it hurts, admitting that, hurts more than anything she’s ever done. “I’m sorry, Adora.”

Then, because she doesn’t feel right taking her usual spot, and because she’s suddenly enormously tired, she settles onto the floor by Adora’s feet, and curls up against the cold concrete, tail wrapping around her knees. Probably, she thinks blearily, Shadow Weaver will find her, and then she’ll kill her, or send her off to be punished by Hordak, and either way, Catra will suffer, but it doesn’t matter. She’s long past caring what happens to her.

For the moment, though, with the barracks empty and Adora breathing peacefully just above her, all she can be feel is a guilty, stolen sense of contentment. Like this is the last moment she’ll ever get, and she might as well enjoy it.

And besides, she’s so, so tired.

She’s closing her eyes before she even thinks to do so, and even as some part of her mind screams that it’s a bad idea, it’s too late for her. With one last sighing breath, her head settles into her arms and she slips into deep, blissful sleep. 

She wakes with the trembling point of a sword in her face, and blinks once, then twice, then looks up into the face of its wielder.

Adora is standing over her, not as She-Ra, but as herself. Her knuckles are white against the hilt, her fingers shaking slightly. Her lips are pressed together tightly, like she might cry, or yell, or both.

“You,” she says, and there are honest tears in her eyes, and Catra can only think that it’s all she deserves.

“You remember,” she manages to say, and Adora swallows hard, and nods once. Her eyes are glittering too bright, sharp with such betrayal that it’s like looking in the sun; it hurts more than anything.

“I’ve been—” she starts, then stops, and sucks in a shaky breath, like she’s trying not to cry. “I—you—”

“I’m sorry,” Catra whispers, and it seems to break the dam. Adora freezes, for less than a second, and then a wretched cry escapes her lips, and before Catra can react she reaches down to grab her by the collar and spins, shoving her against the wall with the sword at her throat.

“You tricked me!” Her face twists in agony, the feel of it like a knife, and Catra wants to deny it, but what’s the point? She’s guilty by proxy, by accomplice and implication, and that’s all that matters.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, and Adora just shakes her head, the tip of her sword digging deeper into Catra’s throat.

“It hurts,” she says weakly, and Catra’s heart breaks all over again. “I don’t—everything is foggy. I can barely remember—”

She breaks off with a hiccup that might be a sob and looks away, her eyes glimmering with tears, and Catra can only close her eyes, despite the sword pressing into her skin and the iron grip at her collar.

“You can do it,” she says, her eyes squeezed shut. “You can kill me. I don’t care.”

She expects it to happen. She can feel the point of the sword at her neck, drawing blood, and any moment, she knows, it will plunge in. Her life will spill out at Adora’s hand, wholly deserved, and it’ll all be over.

She’s almost looking forward to the prospect. 

But it doesn’t drive in. Instead, it hesitates there, wavering, and then the pressure disappears. So, too, does the hand at her collar, leaving Catra to sag heavily against the wall and suck in a deep, shaky breath.

When she looks up, Adora is standing over her, an unreadable expression on her face.

“Shadow Weaver did this to me, didn’t she?” she says quietly, and Catra hesitates, then nods. She wants to add too that it was her fault, that she only caught her as she fell and didn’t prevent the falling in the first place, but Adora doesn’t ask. Instead, she only thumbs the hilt of her sword, her eyes distant and indecipherable.

“I should have stopped her,” Catra says, because it’s all she can say, and it’s almost a plea. An apology and an explanation all in one, but none of that matters anyway, because she knows Adora will never forgive her. 

Adora doesn’t answer this. Instead, she studies her sword for a long moment, then looks up at Catra, pinning her with a strange look.

“Who found the sword?” she asks, and Catra opens her mouth to answer, then shuts it again. There’s no reason to say it—she knows Adora knows.

Adora looks back down at the sword, her fingers trailing the hilt with an air of almost-longing, like she’s missed it, and Catra’s stomach twists.

_Always second best_ , a voice reminds her, and then another voice reminds her that it’s all she deserves.

“Fine,” Adora says then, her voice hard, her eyes not even looking at Catra, and then, before Catra can react, she steps back and turns. 

It’s not what Catra expects. It takes her a moment to find her voice.

“Wha—wait!” She lunges into action, leaping forward and grabbing Adora by the sleeve. Pure, dizzy anger is rising in her belly, turning her thoughts on her head. “What the hell are you doing?”

Adora twists around, then wrenches her hand from her grip. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m leaving, Catra!”

“Yeah, but—” But she’s forgetting something. But she can’t leave like this, not without— “Why won’t you kill me?”

And all of Adora’s rage and justified horror falls away into utter surprise. She only stares. “What?”

Catra takes a step back, both angry and strangely self-conscious. “Kill me,” she growls. “I deserve it.”

For a moment, Adora doesn’t move. Then she takes a step forward, then another, then she rushes Catra, pinning her to the wall with her sword flat against her throat, not the tip of it, but the blade, and it isn’t touching her skin, but rather boxing her in place. 

“I remember,” she says quietly, and for a moment, Catra has no idea what she’s talking about, but then she sees the tears in her eyes and something clicks. “When you kissed me. That night. And then we got caught.”

Catra can’t speak, so she nods instead, something heavy caught in her throat. 

“I remember Shadow Weaver,” she says, her voice so soft it’s hard to make out, “and she took me to the Black Garnet chamber. I was so afraid, but then she just turned around, and put a finger to my head and it _hurt_ but—”

She looks up then, and her eyes are shining with tears and years of built-upon lost, like she can’t even speak for it.

“I always wanted it,” she says, and swallows hard, sniffling like a child. “I couldn’t even figure it out after—it was like I was missing something—but I missed you all the time, and I still—I still—”

She stops then, and her eyes roam over Catra’s face, landing on her lips, and Catra realizes what she’s about to do only a second before she does it. Then Adora’s lips are pressed against hers, hungry and wanting and desperate, spilling over with all the things she never even said, maybe never even knew to say, and for several long seconds it’s not perfect, and it hurts, but it’s everything.

And then she wrenches away, the sword jerking from Catra’s throat, and she steps back, shaking her head. There are still tears in her eyes.

“It’s not fair,” she says, and all Catra can think, with a laugh that never makes it past her throat, that that’s the truest thing Adora has ever said.

“No, it isn’t,” she responds, and her eyes slide shut with weary exhaustion, her shoulders sag against the wall, and for a long second she stays like that, bone tired and dead-footed. 

When she opens her eyes, Adora is gone. Catra didn’t even hear the footsteps. There’s nothing in the barracks to remind of her, except for her messy bed and her tidied locker, and Catra herself, who’s covered with the memory of her scent and her lips and her glittering, anguished gaze.

Catra stares at the door for several seconds, then slides down until she hits the floor with a thump. Then she curls in on herself, and rocks back and forth, but doesn’t cry, because she can’t bring herself to tears. Instead, she only holds the hurt to her chest, hugging it close, like a promise she should never have given up on in the first place.

—————

Three hours later, the Fright Zone is a scene of scattered chaos, and Catra is arrested for suspected treason. She doesn’t hear the whole story until she’s handcuffed and dragged before military court, and a military judge calls out her crimes.

Charged with aiding and abetting in the escape of the known war criminal, She-Ra. Charged with accomplice in the death of Shadow Weaver, murdered at She-Ra’s hand. Charged with high treason, and sentenced to thirty years of prison time, no possibility of parole. 

She doesn’t go to prison. Military bureaucracy and manpower shortages work out for her, and her sentence is commuted to six months of jail time, mandatory reconditioning, and the loss of her probationary Force Captain status.

She doesn’t care about that, but she’d be lying to say that she doesn’t care about the mandatory reconditioning.

For six months, she’s kept in a prison underground, and for three days out of every week she’s led to a chamber where she’s subjected to a serious of painful tests designed to transform her back into a loyal Horde soldier.

It works, in one sense. Catra doesn’t fight back, but keeps her head down and takes the punishment, works hard and, after her mandatory length of time, is released back to the barracks. She keeps working hard, and soon she’s assigned back to field status, because despite all her faults, she is an excellent fighter.

She never fights She-Ra.

Even as a supposed loyal Horde soldier. Catra knows how to get out of things she doesn’t want to do. She pulls duties and trades shifts and bribes others with anything she can, and never lands a mission that will put her in contact with She-Ra. She’s reformed, maybe, but she’s also newly fragile in a way she can’t describe, and the thought of facing Adora on the battlefield makes her limbs go shaky and her heart go fast in a way that turns her whole body weak.

For nearly a year, things continue as such. In that time, Catra becomes a model soldier. She fights, and she sleeps, and she doesn’t talk, and she stews in a silent maelstrom of all the things she never got to say, and all the chances she wasted, and all the things she deserved besides everything that she got. Sometimes, she wishes that Adora had killed her. Sometimes, she thinks it’s better that she didn’t, because maybe she deserves the punishment.

Nearly a year after her sentence, and six months after she’s graduated from the barracks to her own basic room, she wakes up in the middle of the night to find Adora climbing through her window.

“I—damn it—ow!” The crash of a familiar body to the floor jerks Catra out of restless sleep and immediately into a defensive posture, which falls away the moment she sees who it is.

“Adora?” In an instant, her heart is pounding fast and her limbs are shaky with a strange sort of fear, like she’s being put nose to nose with the result of her own monstrous actions.

Which, in a way, she is.

“Yep,” Adora grunts as she clambers to her feet, then turns brushes her sleeves off and turns to Catra. She stands at the foot of her bed, hands lightly on her hips, like a commander giving a briefing. Her gaze, hard with a few new-old scars stretching across her skin, roams over Catra’s face.

“Hi,” she says, and for lack of a better idea, Catra responds.

“Hi,” she says, and maybe she’s imagining it, but Adora’s face softens slightly, only for a second, before she hardens again.

“Looks like you got your own room,” she says, and glances, frowning, to the window. “Could have used a bigger window, though.”

“You shouldn’t be here.” The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them, and Adora’s gaze jerks back to her. “Why did you come back?”

For a moment, Adora doesn’t answer. Her mouth opens, then closes again, and cuts into a hard line.

“I don’t know,” she says, and for a second all the hardness falls away into confusion, as if she’s still trying to parse the decision herself. “I hate you, you know.”

The words hurt, but they should. Catra just nods. 

“Yeah, well,” she growls, because it’s easier to be defensive, “you should.”

Adora’s eyes narrow, and her fists tighten, but she doesn’t rise to her tone. Instead, she only glares for long seconds. Then, she abruptly collapses at foot of the bed, and as Catra watches in shock, buries her head in her hands.

“No, I don’t,” she mumbles into her palms. “Everybody tells me I should, but I don’t.”

Despite herself, Catra laughs. “Welcome to my world.”

Adora looks up at her with bleary, red eyes, then shakes her head.

“What are we supposed to do, Catra?” she asks, and her tone is entirely wretched, like it’s eating her right up from the inside. Catra knows the feeling. “Why can’t we just be enemies? Why do I have to—to—”

She catches the edge of the word on her teeth and turns away before she says it, and Catra, who has been leaning forward without realizing it, visibly sags.

“I don’t know,” she mutters to the bedsheets. “Pretty stupid of you, if you ask me.”

Adora laughs, and it’s choking and teary and could reasonably pass for a sob. “Is that what I am? An idiot, for loving you?”

“Maybe,” Catra says, but she can barely get the word out. Her heart is swelling too much, like it might burst right through her ribs, and she wants to laugh, but she wants to cry too. “Maybe I’m an idiot too. Maybe we’re just literally the stupidest people in the world.”

Adora laughs again, quiet and hiccuping, and leans back on her hands, her eyes on her feet. “Maybe we are,” she concedes, then looks up at Catra with eyes glittering too bright.

“I couldn’t think about you for months,” she says, and her voice is so soft Catra has to strain to make it out. “I mean, I thought about you all the time, but I was so angry, and I just—I just—”

She breaks off, then looks away, and Catra wants to tell her that yes, she knows exactly how it feels, she knows the betrayal and the pain and the anger because she felt it all when Adora left, but she also knows that it’s not the right thing to say. Pain isn’t supposed to be traded for pain—it doesn’t work like that.

Adora doesn’t pick up her sentence. She only stares miserably at her feet, one boot tapping idly against the bare floor, then lets out a heavy sigh. Then, without warning, she launches herself to her feet and turns to face Catra, her hands in fists at her side.

“It’s not fair,” she says, her upper lip trembling, and it’s so plaintive, such a cry of a righteous child, that Catra lets out a bitter laugh.

“Who ever said it had to be fair?” she asks, and Adora doesn’t answer, but bites her lip.

“It could be better,” she says at last, and that’s true too, so true that Catra has no answer for it. For a moment, neither of them speak. They only wait there, neither one looking at each other, neither one willing to break the heavy silence of all the could-have-beens that hang between them.

Then Adora clears her throat, and when she speaks, she’s got that familiar, authoritative edge to it. Like she’s trying to be the hero everybody says she is.

“There’s a place for you at the Rebellion, you know,” she says, and Catra has to resist the urge to snort. Among princesses? She has to be joking. “Unless you’re happier here.”

And that pulls Catra up short. Because is she happy? For a moment, she has to stop and take stock. And the answer is, quite instantly, no. Why would she be? The Horde has always been an unwelcoming, brutal place. She used to think that she could work around it by turning into the most brutal one of them all, but love and morality crushed her before she could. Now she’s only hollow, a living, breathing shell, and she works and she eats and she sleeps and beyond that, she has nothing.

When she doesn’t answer, Adora sighs. “Fine,” she says, and draws herself up to her full height. “But—think about it. Please.”

She doesn’t say anything more, and Catra doesn’t respond, and when she finally looks up at the soft sound of her footsteps, she’s already climbing through the window, swearing softly, and it takes all of Catra’s willpower to prevent a smile. She stares at the window for a long time after she leaves, and then, because it’s the middle of the night and she’s too tired to think, she lays down and pulls the covers over her head, and tries not to dream. 

She doesn’t notice the note on the windowsill until she’s halfway dressed, shirt on and pajama bottoms hanging off her waist, socks sliding down her ankles. The paper flutters, caught in the updraft from the rickety A/C unit, and she catches it out of the corner of her eye, then frowns and crosses the room. The corner of the paper tears as she yanks it from its place, and when she turns it over, she catches Adora’s scribbly handwriting.

_You made a promise too._

Catra stares, the paper caught between her fingers. For a moment she doesn’t even know what Adora’s talking about, but then she remembers that moment in the Whispering Woods, just before she’d dragged Adora back to the Fright Zone and before Shadow Weaver had wiped her mind.

_I promise. I’ll help your stupid friend—if we do this together._

But it’s not just that, what Adora’s saying. It’s more, not just a half-remembered promise in the woods, but all their history, all their bits and pieces, every silent moment between them and reaffirmation of their friendship, all the times they had stuck together and stood up for each other.

The story is over, the pages torn out, but maybe the note in her hands is Adora’s version of binding glue.

Catra stares at the note for nearly a minute. Then she crumples the paper in her fist, and turns to survey her small room. Her heart is beating fast, and both fear and anticipation are warring in her stomach.

She wonders briefly how long it’ll take her to pack.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at hetzi-clutch if you want to talk!


End file.
